Saved Games

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Rather than sending us saved games via email, it is easier for everyone if you simply upload/attach them to a post. You will need to ZIP the GAM file in order to upload it. But once you do that, you only need to left click on the "Click Here To Upload!" label at the bottom of the Reply panel.

[paulderynck]

Yes - let the Madexcepts go the normal way and upload the saved games.

The beauty of that is any one of the beta testers who has some time can take a look at the save and pass their analysis back to Steve - who can also grab it if needs be.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

I haven't been able to use saved games for NetPlay games, other than the ones I created myself. That's because the GAM files include the names of the players, which are needed when the game is restored.

Although the GAM files are plain text, editing them is both difficult and dangerous. Many of the lines in those files are more than 200 characters and a lot of editors truncate lines that exceed a certain length. When they do that, the file is damaged and can't be used to restore the saved game.

But I'll write a little program (probably tomorrow) to change the names of the players in a GAM file. That will let me modify saved games from others and run them on my computers, using my user names.

This should enable me to debug NetPlay problems much faster since I won't need to try to recreate situations from scratch. It is always difficult to recreate exactly what the players have done because of optional rules, die rolls, and all the decisions the players make during a game. Saved games bypass a lot of those troubles.

EDIT: I now have a program that lets me use saved NetPlay games to recreate bugs players encounter. I need a saved game from each player and the Next Entry numbers need to match.