Absolutely desperate to save corrupted leaguee

[conception]

I've got a league whose setup is so complicated that it was literally over two years of real life in the making. It's a European league where there are between 10-14 regional leagues where players play their first couple of professional years, then a single 28-32 team league collects players from those leagues into a master league where the best of the best played. I used the use as feeder league option introduced late in 13 or 14 to make this league make sense, but before that function came out I spent months of testing trying to balance the league and doing test sims. Even with that function, I had to run test sims for weeks to balance out the complicated relationships between the leagues, and figure out the quirks of how OOTP would react to what I was doing. I also have around 150 teams (plus affiliates) with custom logos, stadiums, etc., so it was a long haul all around.

As soon as I actually finished testing and began to play, the league started to crash constantly. I was willing to accept this, but after about 7 game years it crashed and I couldn't re-load it. Even the last autosave didnt work. I have a backup that is a couple years old, but I can't deal with losing years AND the game crashing constantly even when I resume. I thought I'd start fresh, not just with a quickstart (which never fixed the problem), but with a template.

Here's the heart of the matter - no template, even one created from a league file before a 50 year sim to build history, will import successfully. I can import the structure into a custom game, but when I go to start the game I get through a couple screens and then get a crash. Every time, with every template. I've tried erasing all players, getting rid of scouts, etc., and nothing works. Either I'm not doing something right, or there is something going on with template creation/import.

I'm willing to rebuild this league line by line, number by number, even with 170+ teaks in numerous leagues, all with customer strategy, modifiers, pcms, and nationalities, but that will take months of backbreaking work that I'd do anything to avoid. If there is anyway I can get my intricate league structure into a clean world.dat file, please help me.

[Lukas Berger]

I feel for you. Much of this is beyond my capabilities. I do have a question/suggestion. The backup you have that does work, have you run the purge tool on it? Di you run the purge tool on the league after you'd set it up?

If not, I'd suggest running the purge tool then auto simming ahead along ways to see if you can get beyond where your latest file is crashing.

If you have run the purge tool already, and it's still crashing, then I don't have anything for you, it's beyond me.

[conception]

I'm not entirely sure what the purge tool is, but I have manually deleted numerous historical text/news/messages files (and the messages.dat), so if the purge tool is designed the slim the saved game file, I've already done that.

I want to clarify that this crash is one that is occurring when loading the saved game file at startup, but the crashes that occurred during game play could happen anytime something was clicked, but mostly when saving the game (once it reaches near 100 percent).

[rudel.dietrich]

Did you save the league as a quick start? If so, can you use that to begin a new league?

To be honest, as much as I play OOTP. I am not sure what the difference between a template and a quickstart is. For my leagues that take many hours to create, I always save them as quick starts.
Never saved a template before. What exactly does it do?

[conception]

Originally Posted by rudel.dietrich

Did you save the league as a quick start? If so, can you use that to begin a new league?

To be honest, as much as I play OOTP. I am not sure what the difference between a template and a quickstart is. For my leagues that take many hours to create, I always save them as quick starts.
Never saved a template before. What exactly does it do?

I saved mutliple quickstarts - one from before I did a longsim, one from after that and before the league draft, and I believe a couple more, or at least a 4 game year old backup that works fine. The issue is that the crashing has been occurring in everything after the longsim (maybe even before) with roughly 1/3 of the times I save, and if I don't save constantly it will end up crashing on a random click anyway. It's not worth a restart only to deal with crashing that will eventually lead to a corrupt league file anyway, and anything started from the quickstarts will have this issue.

While the sheer size of my league could have an impact on it crashing (the amount of RAM it takes up is HUGE), the strange thing is that I abandoned my first version of this league because it was much larger, and this version is actually the streamlined version.

My theory is that the remnant of all the defunct leagues and organizations in my world (the number of these needed was a huge part of my testing) has caused issues for the .dat files at the heart of my save. I know Markus has talked about information from old leagues still being in the .dat files even when they are deleted and unable to be resurrected in game, and God knows how many there are leftover in mine. They are also the only reason why I can think the templates won't work

FYI, a template basically saves your league structure without things like logos, and maybe not even history. It's much slimmer that a quickstart, but since I have all the logo files and things done, it's just a matter of copying those to a new saved game to have those all back again.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by conception

I'm not entirely sure what the purge tool is, but I have manually deleted numerous historical text/news/messages files (and the messages.dat), so if the purge tool is designed the slim the saved game file, I've already done that.

I want to clarify that this crash is one that is occurring when loading the saved game file at startup, but the crashes that occurred during game play could happen anytime something was clicked, but mostly when saving the game (once it reaches near 100 percent).

No, the purge tool is different. When you delete a team or league or player they aren't really deleted, they still are kept in the database in a kind of ghostly format. The purge tool removes all these fragments, that will otherwise cause issues and crashes when they get too numerous, which often happens in a large, complicated database.

First be sure to backup your file. Then go to the game menu > Database Info (Under the Current Game section) > Click the Tools button that will be on the bottom right hand corner of the screen > Click on 'Purge deleted records from the database' > Type 'purge' in the screen that comes up.

Let the tool run. Then try the league out, sim through some years, do stuff that normally makes it crash. See if you still have the same issues.

I'm guessing they'll be much better, if not nearly eliminated.

If not though, then there's likely some sort of extreme corruption going on and only Markus or Andreas will be able to help.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by conception

My theory is that the remnant of all the defunct leagues and organizations in my world (the number of these needed was a huge part of my testing) has caused issues for the .dat files at the heart of my save. I know Markus has talked about information from old leagues still being in the .dat files even when they are deleted and unable to be resurrected in game, and God knows how many there are leftover in mine. They are also the only reason why I can think the templates won't work

That's what the purge tool takes care of.

[conception]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

No, the purge tool is different. When you delete a team or league or player they aren't really deleted, they still are kept in the database in a kind of ghostly format. The purge tool removes all these fragments, that will otherwise cause issues and crashes when they get too numerous, which often happens in a large, complicated database.

First be sure to backup your file. Then go to the game menu > Database Info (Under the Current Game section) > Click the Tools button that will be on the bottom right hand corner of the screen > Click on 'Purge deleted records from the database' > Type 'purge' in the screen that comes up.

Let the tool run. Then try the league out, sim through some years, do stuff that normally makes it crash. See if you still have the same issues.

I'm guessing they'll be much better, if not nearly eliminated.

If not though, then there's likely some sort of extreme corruption going on and only Markus or Andreas will be able to help.

Wow, that is exactly the type of tool I was looking for. So much of my time could have been saved if I would have known this was in the game. I do seem to remember Markus or one of the staff doing something like this manually for someone years ago, but I never knew that tool made it into the game.

It'll take some time for me to test it out because my leagues are on another machine and it's late, but I'll spend my day at work tomorrow figuring out where I want to try and start and then see if purge will make it work smoothly.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by conception

Wow, that is exactly the type of tool I was looking for. So much of my time could have been saved if I would have known this was in the game. I do seem to remember Markus or one of the staff doing something like this manually for someone years ago, but I never knew that tool made it into the game.

It'll take some time for me to test it out because my leagues are on another machine and it's late, but I'll spend my day at work tomorrow figuring out where I want to try and start and then see if purge will make it work smoothly.

Hope it goes well. I think it will.

Not sure when the tool was added, maybe last year. It's a real lifesaver.

I know I had a similar db years ago that I loved, on OOTP10 or so, that bit the dust for me. Wish the tool had been around then.

EDIT: Removed the inaccurate statement about player histories. You do keep them when running the tool.

[conception]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Hope it goes well. I think it will.

Not sure when the tool was added, maybe last year. It's a real lifesaver.

I know I had a similar db years ago, on OOT10 or so that I loved, that bit the dust for me. Wish the tool had been around then.

One thing though, I've never figured out how to run the tool and keep the player history files, since the tool assigns all new id's to the players but doesn't renames the history text files to the new ids.

So you'll probably lose those, unless someone smarter than me can tell you how to keep them.

Since I can't access the league file I'd really like to resurrect, losing player history isn't a big deal to me. I still have my quickstart from year 3, while I crashed in year 7, but redoing those years in my league would just be torture without the crashing. My league has no trading, so with a roughly equivalent group of players coming through the draft and free agency, I'd end up trying to much to make a carbon copy of my original moves, and only end up disappointed.

[conception]

I'm happy to report at least a partial success. It appears some of my further simmed leagues were too far gone - I had one from a couple years of playing that I would have used to create a new saved game, but the purge tool wouldn't make it all the way through before crashing. There were astronomically more players in those databases than the ones I ended up using, from before I had even added players for an historical longsim. This one worked and the couple fixes I have to make for each league are absolutely insignificant, so I should have another historical sim done by the evening so I can have yet another initial draft, this time without worrying about constant crashing.

Thanks again for the help, as the time I will save because of this is priceless.