Modified tag on save without mods?

[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.