[1.60] Frozen Galaxy - RAM hardware issue detected

[HBK]

Most of the error messages there are harmless and almost certainly either have nothing to do with the problem, or are a result of it rather than the cause. The two important ones are the backspace character and the "ammunt", both of which are "bit flip" errors that can only have happened between the game creating the savegame image in memory, and that image being written to the disk. It isn't possible for them to have be caused by errors in the "game world".

Your’re right. Il corresponds both times to the second bit of an ascii character (I’m guessing the BS was supposed to be a LF). I’ll try to find a better memory checker and let it run overnight.

Thanks for your help!

[HBK]

Ok, Windows Memory Diagnostics is crap it seems. MemTest86 found an error. Now on to checking if its a chip defect or some bad setting (looks like a chip defect).

Oh well, let’s look at the bright side, today I learned that memory chips can deteriorate over time (I did an extensive check when setting up this PC some time ago ...).

Thanks for your help guys!

Edit: Actually it failed the hammer test so it may just be my motherboard aging and I may be able to fix this by bumping up DRAM voltage a little bit. Anyways it seems it was an hardware fault after all.

Edit 2: I misread the test and it’s just a plain chip error. What’s funny is that after numerous tests and tweaks it always fails at a very specific test (bit fading, always the same bit/adresss) which may explain why it only causes issues in very specific use cases (such as, you know, saving in X4).

So problem explained it would seem. Thanks again.

[RainerPrem]

Since the XML structure was mentioned here, there is perhaps a hint:

In my savegames (German game version) there is often an xml-element "ventures" close to the end of the file. It contains an escaped xml-string (&lt; instead of < etc.) . But this inner string is encoded in characterset windows-8859, and not utf-8 like the rest. The escaping does not escape the umlauts contained in the German text like "XEN Überfallkommando". So this is not a legal XML-File, as e.g. the DotNet-XMLDocument.Load() method complains.

[KlausM]

Since the XML structure was mentioned here, there is perhaps a hint:

In my savegames (German game version) there is often an xml-element "ventures" close to the end of the file. It contains an escaped xml-string (&lt; instead of < etc.) . But this inner string is encoded in characterset windows-8859, and not utf-8 like the rest. The escaping does not escape the umlauts contained in the German text like "XEN Überfallkommando". So this is not a legal XML-File, as e.g. the DotNet-XMLDocument.Load() method complains.

Indeed, there has been an issue with the ventures element, which could cause a minor issue when loading a savegame - but the cause was different, and it was already fixed in 1.60.