why does the editor not save sometimes???

[myythryyn]

so im frustrated right now, i just lost a half hour or so of editing. this island i was making ill have to completely redo.

i cant figure out why, but the editor doesnt save somtimes. it goes through the motions, i press save, i see the blue bars, the blue bars complete. i even close the editor and it repacks the file. i used to think that using "save as" worked better, but im not sure about that

then i re open the editor i find out it didnt save, and it loads the previous older version of the map before changes.
this has happened multiple times. im paranoid now and save at least four times over and over to make sure it saves. i even save the game as another filename just to be sure.
but today i was in a rush and only saved once. and it didnt save. i lost all my work.

i used to think it only happened with scripts, if you just worked on scripts, it wouldnt save, since there were a couple times i lost chunks of script i did. ive learnt now to keep a word document copy of script while im working, or i would have had to retype alot of script when the editor decides to not save.
but now it happened with this multiplayer map, it didnt save the terrain i did.
has this happpened to anyone else?
does anyone have any idea why this happens? is it a bug? i have no idea how it could go through the motioins of saving, yet not save.

[Pitsu]

because you have the game running at the same time? You cannot alt-tab out of game (even if it is a completely different map or main screen open) do editing and then go back.The game seems to lock files inside all h5m archives. Saving during that time generates a new (set of) file(s) inside the archive and finally it may be quite messy.

May be that there are other reasons when the save fails

[myythryyn]

no, its not that the game was running at the time, i usually only have the game running when im testing, not editing.

thats why im really confused, i dont understand how a program could say it saved, but didnt....its doing something to the file....but maybe it has to do with how it repacks it. i guess im the only unlucky one to have this happen to.

another thing that happened once is that the editor saved a file that ended up being corrupted and i couldnt load.

so my advice to anyone, save multiple times, and keep multiple back ups of your map file your working on.

[alavris]

another thing that happened once is that the editor saved a file that ended up being corrupted and i couldnt load.

I had the same problem. Then I discovered that using special characters in map file name caused that problem, so now I use only letters and digits.
.

[Sir_Toejam]

It does seem that error feedback is, to put it mildly, a bit lacking in the editor.

It's definetly something that could be improved on fairly easily. However, based on the initial release, I rather doubt it will be.

trial and error appears to be the only way to slog through the vagaries of this particular bit of software.

[Razeriel]

I had this problem sometimes...
Try to save in an other file. And one tip to you: when map saves properly a message box opens with a list of so called "errors" on the map (I mean "tile intersections..." etc.). If you don't see this list - then the map is not saved really.

[Mozared]

I've been having partially your problem;

I've got a town in my map, for which I picked the +ore specialization and inserted a custom name+description. Ever since I did that the town specialization refuses to save. I need to reset the town specialization manually before saving everytime, else it will just automaticaly remove it for some reason. I've been trying it without custom name/description lately, but that makes no difference; I must reset the specialization before I safe or it will be gone again. The editor seems to be still quite buggy...

As for your problem, does it only occur on that map, or on others too? Cause my problem only occurs on 1 map...

[myythryyn]

i have heard there are problems with some specializations, that they do not work for some towns and you have to pick another. something like that did happen for a necro town i made, involving increased tower damage, and i had to change it to increased offence/defense instead.

as for my game not saving, i now save the game muliple times, and keep multiple copies, so it doesnt happen anymore. i never save just once. i lost trust in the editor, and nothing is worse than loosing your work and having to do it over just after you get it perfect.

[myythryyn]

well it happened again.

this time while the map was saving, in mid progress, the editor crashed and i got the windows error message.
so i had to close the program and it corrupted my map file.

luckily my paranoia paid off and i keep multiple back ups of the file as im making it. if i didnt do that, i would have just lost two weeks of work. this time i only lost a half hour of work.

so be aware the map editor can be an unstable program.

[datarush]

Yes you definitely want to back up your map files. What I've noticed but haven't quite figured out is the editor is real twitchy with adding/modifying heroes, and perhaps towns. When you do that it often if not always changes the map to teams, but usually incorrectly and it crashes the game. It was messed up so bad the last time it happened I had to revert to a previous save. I've been saving two backups on a couple of flash drives.