I was playing in a new area and was stuck, so decided to go back to see if I missed something. This triggered the game to load the old area. This took longer than normal, about 5-8 minutes, so I decided to exit the game and reload it. Well now I can’t seem to load any recent saves that I have. The most recent save I can load is from hours ago. I’d rather not replay all that again, is there a way to fix save files?
You’d better off with replaying the parts you had lost - while it is generally possible to “fix” anything in the world including Source engine savegames you would have to know the internals of the engine in detail to really do it. What is surprising me is that you can’t load a lot of savegames if I understand it right from your description. Had you been using Main Menu -> Save -> New Savegame or - as most of us - had been sticking with quick saves?
Well that’s unfortunate. If it helps at all, I am a programmer and do feel comfortable fooling around with “hidden” files and the like. I’ve mostly stuck with quick saves, although I do believe the file I can load was a manual save.If there really is no other way then is it possible at all to just unlock all the levels without running through them all? Just so I can start as close as possible to where I was before.
In case your saves had been corrupted somehow - you would have to fix them so data structures contain correct and valid info inside them. As you’re programmer you know that it’s impossible to do without knowing details about savegame format and data structure layout. IIRC it’s not something that is publically known/documented so far for Source engine.
AFAIK you’re expected to be able to “start up a new game” only with maps having letter “a” as their last symbol, i.e. using something like “map bm_c1a1a” would place you into a new game with a base set of the weapons you’re expected to have at that point of the game. Also you could simply use a new game menu and select a chapter you want to start playing from. Hope that would suffice your needs.
Yeah, I figured as much. I was hoping there was some sort of documentation that I’d be able to look through and try to fix it myself.
During all the attempts to reload my corrupt save files I didn’t even think about looking at the unlocked stages. Turns out I can start not to far off where I was. Thanks a lot for your help.
Try going to you steamapps\sourcemods\bms\cfg
folder
If you look in the config.cfg file for sv_unlockedchapters
& change the number in the quotes that follow, this will allow you to start in other chapters, I think you will end up with base weapons rather than what you would have had from natural progression.
I am also experiencing this issue with a number of saved games, saved both via Quick Save and via the Save menu. Are not that many people experiencing this? Seems like a major issue. Seems like the save games are working until I quit Black Mesa, then no longer work when I start it up again. They’re being corrupted somehow. I brought up the developer console for diagnostic messages, and it reports that " is not a valid save game file!". I did nothing myself to corrupt said file, so it must be a bug in the game.
Any of the programmers looking into this? Thanks!