I was reading the documents from 'The Underground 2 mod and it stated that quicksaving would corrupt the saved game and ruin the quest. I was wondering if this was true in this case and in general. Do quick saves actually corrupt your saved games?

I use quicksaves all the time and haven't had a lot of trouble with them. Since the release of MCP I haven't had any trouble at all. I use a quicksave before every tomb door, cave door, and right after getting quests. I don't, however, use them for the whole game. I always save to a new slot at the end of every play session and use that save to start the next session. Thanks to MCP there doesn't seem to be any more problems with quicksaves.



KF

Quick saves won't affect any other saves, but it's not a good idea to rely on them. If your quick save happens to be corrupted on it's own or if you made it just after a major screw up, you're out of luck because there's always only the one. Whenever I think of making a save, I make a manual. I have auto save turned on and have often used it to save some repetition, but I still make frequent manuals because the auto can put you in the same boat as the quick.

I believe this was never really the case. quicksaves are virtually identical to normal saves except that you give a name to a normal save. There's nothing really special about them.

I also believe that the MCP fixes a few cases of what people call savegame "corruption".

not anymore since i use morrowind code patch. reduced save corruption and ctd's to a minimum.

I have quicksave set to a spot on my d-pad I use it so much. I have had quicksaves corrupt in the past and it's always a good idea to keep a few regular saves that you update regularly, especially after big accomplishments, but without quicksaves I'd probably just quit playing Morrowind every time the game crashed. It's nice to have an easy option to save without breaking action: I generally quick save every five minutes.

I am not aware of if the MCP corrects the problem with quicksaves but there is definately some corruption in a quicksave without the MCP. The problems usually occur with long complicated scripts. A specific example can be found with the teleportation skull packaged with New Suran by the Wanderer and also included in New Suran Extended. If a quick save is made at any point after using the skull in the same session then upon loading the save the player will be teleported to last selected destination. This misbehavior only occurs after using a quicksave or autosave. I a normal save is made then the teleport on load does not occur. Other examples will exist, this is just one that I've had experience with.

There have been rumors that making quicksaves periodically and then making a full save when finishing a session improves stability of Morrowind. This was prior to the advent of the MCP. Crashes are now a rarity so there's not a need even as a placebo effect.

In short my advice is: never load a quicksave.

Fully agree.

Seconded.


From my experience, quicksaves can be devastating, as they tend to store artifacts not only from the current game but also from previous ones.
As an example, during a playtesting, one of my testers were doing the same quests paralel with two different characters (different genders). He completed a quest with one character, quicksaved. Later on he was doing the same quest with his other character, had quicksaved and had to load his quicksave. It turned out he couldn't do the quest... because the quicksave 'remembered' he had done it with the other char.

That's one of many oddities with quicksaves I have heard of over the years. Stuttering companions with half-functioning scripts is another common problem.
I have now seen that the problem is as extensive with Oblivion quicksaves as with Morrowind.

So, all in all. I never use quicksaves for saving games. But I use it as a swearword: "Quicksave, I missed that train! Quicksave!!!"

:rofl:

Now we're going to have to add it to the auto-censor.

it decreases the corruption. i don't use quicksave that often... no that's wrong, I use quicksave quite often but usually don't load it but a real save (it's just a help for a you-never-know-situation)... and it is far more stable with mcp.

Just to clarify, I use quicksaves as a sort of "safety net". I quicksave all the time, but I only load the save if MW crashes. I don't rely on them in the least. I've had quite a few instances of a quicksave saving me from re-doing entire sessions. I also use (soon to be past tense as 6.0 is out) MCA 5.2 and have had dozens of times that a quicksave saved me from a "drunkard crash". I totally agree with Nich, Emma, and Pluto as far as relying on them though. As I said, they're a safety net. Thanks to MCP they're a net I rarely have to use, but anything that can save frustration is good for me.



KF

Actually it was. I have never had a problem with manual save, while quick save was corrupted every 2nd-3rd time. At least before I started to use the mentioned code patch as well.

I've never had any problems with quicksaves, even before I used the MCP. However, I recommend keeping manual saves alongside them so that you have a backup.

I'd be interested in seeing what people think are "corrupted" quicksaves. I used to think quicksaves could be corrupted, but now I have tools that can anolyze them, and I'm convinced that what people are calling corruption is actually just cases of bad data. One example is the case of the "delayed spell crash", which I reported to Hrnchamd, and he fixed it in the MCP. In that case, if you loaded a save with this bug in it, Morrowind would crash trying to load it. But it was easy to show with the tools I have that the problem was simply that some data was referencing data that had been cleaned after 72 hours.

In every case I've looked at, I've been able to recover the savegame by finding and deleting the bad data. And in every case, there was no evidence whatsoever that making a normal save would have made any difference.

I understand there are different types of tricky saves; for instance, saves in exteriors won't always load when you first start, but if you load a save from an interior and then hit ESC and load the exterior save, it will usually load up. Also, certain mods get confused and saves won't load the first time, but they will subsequently. Then there are the saves which are broken by adding/removing mods or changing the load order. Generally, I consider any save which cannot be loaded for reasons other than those to be 'corrupted'. It might be called "bad data" and it might be fixable, but not without tools and some experience with it. Basically, if it doesn't work as advertised, it really doesn't matter what I call it . . . it's broken.

I don't use quicksaves, but I recently attempted overwriting old save games to cut down on my manual saves with unique names. After a couple days of this, I tried to overwrite a save and got an error about being unable to write to temp file. I think any Windows user would be wise to save often to new slots simply because nobody knows when Windows will decide to "throw off" bits and bytes of code. I don't think Morrowind is any *more* susceptible to damaged saves than Microsoft Word, but I've certainly had autosaves in Word that weren't loadable.

In my experience, using a combination of autosave-on-rest and manual saves to a new slot at least every two or three hours of gameplay, has saved me from throwing my computer out the window many times after crashes, power outages, and unloadable saves.

Ah well, I don't fuss about the name, bad data or corrupted data, it ain't working for me, so I don't really care about how should I call it.

In any case, maybe I'm utterly wrong, but if I had so many "bad data" in quick saves when they wouldn't want to load up, and if I never had any problems with manual saves (heck, not even with auto-save when sleep) I'd say there is something different. Maybe it's just my luck that all the bad data occurs when I quicksave?

Wouldn't most people consider a save that caused a CTD when loading it due to bad data as "corrupted?"

I find it interesting when looking this thread that those who have been around here for years all state they don't rely on quicksaves, and those who are relatively recent additions to our community use them without problems. Significant?

Although the only real tool I had for examining them was Enchanted Editor, I did spend a lot of time comparing saves that couldn't load with other ones. What I usually found was a bunch of extra data in the CELL records that it couldn't identify. By deleting that CELL record, in most cases it would load. That coincides with what john.moonsugar is saying.

When we were having the discussion about whether or not just doing occasional quicksaves improved stability IIRC TP21 played around with his debugger to see if there was any merit to that argument. I don't recall all of the specifics, but he said there was some sort of memory dump that was done before the quicksaves routines that didn't happen before doing a full manual save or autosave.

I for one have always been of the opinion that most save corruption, quick or not, is due to complex scripts. Wrye once postulated that the main difference between the two types of saves is that when you go into the main menu it triggers MenuMode, so most well-written scripts pretty well stop running. Doing a quicksave doesn't do this, so the scripts are saved at whatever state they currently are at.

I have had enough problems, with and without MCP (though I have played far more without honestly,) that I don't use quicksaves. I hardly am inconvenienced by five extra clicks and key presses.

I just use normal saves.

Every once in a while, I will make two new saves, then completely clean out my old saves except for those two new ones. After this, I continue gameplay normally. I also never reload after death; I make sure to completely exit the game first. Following these self-made "rules", I haven't had any corrupted or otherwise non-working saves.

I've briefly considered using quicksaves since installing the MCP, but decided against it since having many saves corrupt in Daggerfall. Yes, unrelated to this subject, except that it has kept me literally obsessive over savegames and the loss thereof.

I don't know where it comes from, but I think someomne mentioned how quicksaves are sometimes a problem loading from an exterior. it almost seemed as if the longer the game went on, the worse the saves were to load. It got to the point I had a save for every town I was in, 2 quicksaves, an autosave and a manual save. It got to be very frustrating. I decided to put Fliggerty's Census Office mod in so i could register with the website and upload my stats. At that point, my game didnt't even make it to the menu to be able to load a save. Also very frustrating. Could very well be a combination ofr the mods i'm using, plus MGE and MWE. With no backup files, I am now starting a new game. I'm ashamed to say i've had this game for a long while now and still haven't finished it due to constant problems. One of these days, i'll get there. At least there's modding to fall back on.

Unless it's a typo, I'd say MWE is the majority of your problem. It's known to cause serious problems with saves.



KF

No, that wasn't a typo. I'm using Journal Enhanced as well as Writing Enhanced. I thought it would be good to have since some of the journal entries don't mention locations of people or places. So when it comes time to go back to the quest, I can't remember where/who to go back to. On the other hand, I didn't use these mods as much as I had thought (sometimes I just forgot I had them), so maybe un-installing them would be the best way to go.

A better solution for the quest problem would (imho) be to use Melian's Teleport Mod. You're already using MGE so you should already have MWSE. That way you can have as many marks as you like and can mark every quest giver with a descriptive name (the teleport mod allows you to name your own marks) and you'll be a simple recall away from anywhere you've marked.
I'll never play without it again.



KF

I do remember reading something about teleportation improvements that allowed you to set more than 1 location to go to. I found Improved Teleportation 2.0 (not sure who made it at the moment) so I decided to add it. Is this the same mod as Melian's Teleport Mod?

Not even close.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8153 is the mod I'm raving about. I don't mean to denigrate any other mod, but this is the absolute best teleport mod ever made (imho)!

All the other teleport mods are relatively old technology-wise. This one is the cutting edge.



KF