Save game crash

[Wretched]

 I've had this happen so many times but have now worked out how to make it happen. If I am saving a large game, then while the game is saving I open any file (files that are completly isolated from ags, like a readme.txt), or even just browse, in the Compiled directory, then XP goes into extremely slow mode. The saving game dialog stays on screen and appears to just hang, and every disk acces, from any application, takes ages, for example it take about 15 minutes to close photoshop. Everything still works, just incredibly slowly.

[Pumaman]

While AGS is saving the game it is using the disk quite intensively, so if you try and use another application it will tend to slow to a crawl until AGS has finished saving.

The best solution is just not to try and do anything else while the game is being saved.

[Kweepa]

Does it really take 15 minutes to save the game?
Once it saves does everything go back to normal speed?

[Wretched]

I've left it go for 30 mins before now and it has never finished. I have to do a complete reboot, and suffer the consequences. I really think that programmes should not, practically, take out the operating system just because you browse a folder it's writing to.

[Elliott Hird]

What ELSE could it do? Put it in your mind? It has to save to disk, and it can't really share it between apps.

[Wretched]

I sorry but XP is a multi application environment, disk access is shared all the time. No other programmes I use has this behaviour. The intresting thing about the slow down is that the Hard Disk access light is OFF and it still crawls.

[Pumaman]

How large is your game? (ie. how many MB is your compiled folder)?

It can take a while to save the game if your game is large, but it should always finish, given enough time.

[SSH]

Have you got Microsoft Anti-Spyware Agent Enabled? This can, in my experience, slow down disk access a huge amount, especially if you are doing stuff with EXEs...

[Wretched]

Current compiled size is 200Mb, I've had same problem happen with a 50Mb game also. Game takes about 2 mins to save normally with constant disk thrashing. Once it goes wrong, the disk activity stops and not even the task manager can stop AGS, I have to turn computer off, though as I said I can close other programmes down but only very very slowly, and I've got 10Gb space free and no spyware programmes running.

[Pumaman]

Do you have any anti-virus programs or things like ZoneAlarm running? It might be worth disabling them temporarily and seeing if that helps. As SSH says, when EXE files are being modified things like anti-virus apps can get a bit edgy.

[Elliott Hird]

XP being "multi-application modular hyper-enviroment" is really just market hype... if anything it's worse at it then previous versions.

[SSH]

Well, thats just plain false: XP is built on NT rather than DOS and is much better for it. However, its nowhere near as stable as Unix systems

[Elliott Hird]

[SARCASM]The next person who says NT is stable gets slapped with a wet trout.[/SARCASM]
Yeah, UNIX is the way to go.

[Wretched]

Ok, I think it was AVG resident Shield that was causing the hanging.
Thanks all.
As an issue though, it might be prudent for AGS to save the executeable with a different extension and just rename it to an .exe after saving the game ?

[Elliott Hird]

That would just slow things down!

[Wretched]

Correction, that 'should' just slow things down!

Here's what I did,
Turned off AVG Resident shield, saved game, whilst saving opened a browser on Compiled directory and held down F5 (repeatedly refresh), no problems.

Turned on AVG Resident shield, saved game, whilst saving opened a browser on Compiled directory and held down F5 (repeatedly refresh), system hangs during the creating exe part (ie. crawls to a unusable speed, requiring reboot).

Pretty conclusive.

[Gilbert]

It's also possible that the "real time scanning" feature of Virus Scanners consumes LARGE amount of memory when a LARGE file is being created (since AGSEdit is saving a LARGE file, it's possible it's consuming LARGE amount of memory also), so the LARGE + LARGE = HUGE memory consumption can cause hazards (that's what Window$ is made of, we all knew that ). In that case it's not only a slow down...

[Pumaman]

Yes, it's quite possible that every time an EXE file is modified, the AV prog re-scans it; which could mean that as AGS is creating the file, your AV app keeps re-scanning it continuously.

Ive never used AVG Resident Sheild, but most AV progs don't seem to cause this issue; I use Norton Antivirus for example and I dont have a problem.