Modified tag on save without mods?

[braman]

How it is possible I am have modified Tag on my save without mods , save editing and steam workshop off>? Can somone explain my this, and i am pissed off at you guys Egsoft i am play siance X3 Reunion. Without mods always. I am demand repair this issue!!!

[Alan Phipps]

A modified save cannot be 'repaired', all you can do is go back to an earlier unmodified save and avoid whatever caused the issue.

The most likely causes for an incorrect modified tag is real-time file checking by your antivirus or protection app (which can appear to modify the file between source disk and loading into RAM), or changing to (some) non-release beta game versions. Other less likely causes are save or game corruption due to disk/RAM issues, power spikes and noise, or having copied and moved the saves or game files and so having introduced unexpected compression, encryption or flag settings on files.

Just for clarity, have you ever had mods/scripts/edits active in this current game install and since thought you had totally disabled them before restarting?

[braman]

No i am not use mods but i am allow ventures visitors... omg 3 days gaming lost.... Please add an information thet on visitors modified game save... is not there...

[Alan Phipps]

Venture visitors do not modify your game. Indeed the visitors cannot visit if their own game is modified!

It might be worth running a verification of your game install.

[braman]

Then in not an antyvirus software , no mods no nothing closed game properly then why? Tag show up yesterday after allowing Ventures... My previous save is before on ventures and dont have tag modified. i am report an bug then: allowing ventures modified game and breaking vanila. 3 days of play 30 hours lost 2 stations and 20 ships not fun an all.

[Alan Phipps]

Again for clarity, are you 100% sure the modified only appeared yesterday? What sometimes happens to make it seem linked to ventures is that it is only when players try to use ventures and are told that they can't that they notice only then that they have become modified at some time in the past. OK, your edit seems to have covered that now.

All I can suggest is to link two saves as before and after the ventures/modified tag and let the devs take a look.

[braman]

Ok am deleted this saves and reload save from 12.07.2019 without tag ehh so many stations scan to do. Please close the topic.

[Alan Phipps]

Well you can enable ventures and see if it modifies your game again - just as a trial. There's no risk to your last unmodified save by doing so.

[braman]

Yes Ventures doesnt make modified. But: Finding construction plans by scanning. This modifying the game. If we do not have enough high rank in the faction. And we'll find a plan to build a module that is still locked to the player, the game automatically tags the save as modified. Just how can you treat players and game mechanics so badly? I am found this now scaning for blueprints... Remove this modifited thing from game i pay for this game and i am demand play with without bugs like that. Game mechanics brake f save? This is first game in my life so badly scripted. Spacefuel factory... hahah seriously...

[CBJ]

Do you have before-and-after savegames that demonstrate this actually happening? Or a precise sequence of actions that makes it happen? I'm asking because the system for marking the game as modified simply doesn't work in such a way that scanning something could affect it; it's based on the state of the installed game files, not what you do in the game itself. It seems much more likely that your problem actually stems from interference from, say, anti-virus software, which just happened to coincide with something you did in the game, or a corrupt file that happened to be loaded at that point. However if you have savegames or a sequence of actions as requested above, then we'd be extremely interested to hear about them.

[Imperial Good]

Maybe a good idea would be to warn players with a modal popup dialog requiring confirmation to proceed when their game is detected as modified? For modders who want a modified game there could be a setting to disable this warning. This would remove any ambiguity as to when they were detected as playing a modified game and hopefully allow people to corelate what is causing it. I suspect a large part of the issue at the moment is that players are not initially aware that their game is now being marked as modified and they only notice it after the cause has passed.

[braman]

Yes i am agree and no my antivirus dont tuch game files they are exception. Game files from the beginning are added to the exceptions, it's already from x3 AP problem with this so this was the first thing I did. Overall, the game caught a vulkan bug. There was no tag during the game after crash. I scanned the spacefuel station blueprint, and destroyed the Xeon P in my pegasus, I docked to the Teladi station to buy a plan for the administrative center I saved game with Q save before and after after I bought the plans, the modifited option appeared.

[CBJ]

So you're saying that this happened after a crash? In that case I suggest you run a file verification on the game files via the Steam client, as it's possible that a file has become corrupted. This won't make an existing modified savegame unmodified again, but it should ensure that previously-unmodified savegames don't become modified.

[braman]

Meybe my hard rives make this problem> Western Digital Blue 3D NAND 500GB M.2-2280 SSD ? Am checked game files nothing found. I trully diesnt have a clue how to avoid this thing am weit for next update of the game and play from save without this bug. 3 saves after crash was ok only quick save is croupted like 20 mints from last save and 1 hour after crash. in this time am maked 3 manual saves they are ok to time am make this think wrote up upper.

[CBJ]

Again, if you have saves from just before (unmodified) and just after (modified) then we'd be very interested in seeing them. Just upload them somewhere, as described in the sticky threads at the top of the forum, and provide a link. Just waiting until the next update isn't likely to change anything, though, especially if this turns out to be something like corruption of files that is outside our control.

[braman]

I am send You pw.

[Imperial Good]

Be aware that saves made during a crash will as good as always become marked as modified. This is because the save is incomplete as the game crashed before all data could be written. The saves might still load due to the robustness of XML however usually they are severely degraded often with entire systems of content being purged. Such saves should be discarded and the previous save loaded instead.

SSDs have a finite life expectancy measured in "drive writes" or "terabytes written". Once the drive approaches the manufacturer guaranteed amount it will become increasingly prone to data corruption. In this case the drive should be replaced. A drive such as the "Western Digital Blue 3D NAND 500GB M.2-2280" should have a TBW of around 300 which is 600 full drive writes. One can see the current TBW of most SSDs by querying their S.M.A.R.T. status. Write amplification will increase towards the end of drive life as data must be constantly moved around to prevent degradation. SSDs do not like having their power interrupted. If your computer is crashing with a power interrupt this can degrade or even brick the SSD, especially if it was under high write loads at the time.

X4 should not be crashing frequently anymore, at least on Windows, so if it is for you then there might be some other issue. If it is crashing frequently and you are using an overclocked GPU or CPU I recommend reverting to stock settings and checking if this improves the stability of X4, since overclocks can become unstable over time and their stability does vary with work load.

[stefanEgo]

@braman: First of all: Sorry for the trouble you encountered with playing the game. CBJ asked me to take a look at your issue.

I'm currently checking out the data you sent us.

Also to clear up a couple of incorrect claims I see here in the thread:
Usually Antivirus software is not to be blamed for cases where games get modified. It can happen theoretically if very specific file operations get blocked by the AV-software while other file operations are not blocked, though this is so unlikely to happen (unless the AV software is really bugged which will then also be notable by other software running into issues) that this is nothing which you'd normally consider as a possibility for these issues (you'd better be off playing in the lottery than running into such a case).
Also AV software doesn't change the content of the file an application wants to access. It only prevents or allows the requested access to files.

With regards to crashes causing a game to get modified:
This too is not a possible condition. The savegame is written to a temporary file location. If there's a crash during the process of saving the game, the temp file will remain with incomplete data and won't be loadable directly by a vanilla client. At least this applies to the current version (2.50). Older versions were indeed susceptible to this type of issue and that (plus all the other issues you'd run into when loading corrupted savegames) was why we improved the handling there.

In 99% of the cases the problem occurred because a savegame was accidentally loaded with a modified client and then taking over the savegame to the "clean" client goes unnoticed. As suggested in this thread here we are currently missing to display a warning/confirmation box if these kind of situations. We see that this is improved in a following patch for sure.
The other case where games are modified is game data corruption. While usually in such cases the game won't run and will crash eventually, there's a chance that for certain file/data corruption the game will appear as running just fine, while it'll notice that the data isn't vanilla and handles the case as if you intentionally modified the client (i.e. tag the game as having been modified). Again, as suggested in this thread too, we should improve this case so the user is notified about this and doesn't blindly overwrite their vanilla saves unnoticed.

[stefanEgo]

Unfortunately it seems that the freedownload limit has been reached on that account after I downloaded the 1st savegame. Testing that save doesn't appear that this is the one marking the game as modified.
Could you provide the saves on a different platform where I can download them (f.e. google drive or Dropbox)?

Best send the download links then to crash@egosoft.com with the subject "modified game" and link to this forum thread in the mail.