I'm trying to pick up an AI (offline!) skirmish game i've been playing for a few days, but now I can't even load it up from the save. Apparently I cannot "connect" to a server. Again, I was playing an offline game... Has anyone had this problem before?
This error is confusing, however hopefully if I try and explain a little about how PA works it might make more sense... PA was built in 2 parts from the beginning ('client - server') so that when playing multi player, one machine is actually running the game (i.e. the server), whilst everyone else connected to it are essentially running an interactive 'viewer' (the client). The idea of this was to avoid the problem that earlier games like SupCom and TA ran into where one player had a slow computer and everyone's games got slowed down. When you run PA in offline mode, it still works in exactly the same way. The only difference is that the server portion of the game runs on your own machine rather than remotely over the net. This is actually the case for quite a few modern games, although PA is perhaps more separated than most (the server is actually a separate '.exe' that gets loaded when you host an offline game, which is why offline PA uses more memory). This leads to the problem though that sometimes the client will run fine, but the server will run into problems giving you various strange error messages. It could be a general problem that something is preventing the server working on your system (however if you've already been playing that game for a while it sounds like the server usually works fine). Alternatively it may just be that this particular save is broken (if you've been running it for several days it sounds like it's probably going to be really large which might be preventing the server portion from opening it?). I mean can you play a new offline game? If yes then I think your save file is broken. I'm not sure if there's a way to recover a game if this happens, although maybe @DeathByDenim might know more about this than me?
Thanks for the explanation! That helps. I can play a new game/ other saves fine, so it looks like that file is corrupted. Thx again.
Yeah, it sounds like the server executable is crashing while it's trying to load your save game. Could you post the server log from your attempt to load the game? You'll find those here: Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\ (copy-paste this in the address bar of Explorer) OSX: ~/Library/Application Support/Uber Entertainment/Planetary Annihilation/ Linux: ~/.local/Uber Entertainment/Planetary Annihilation/ The server logs look like "server-YYYY-MM-DD.txt". The easiest way to get the right one is to delete all of those logs and then start PA and try to load the game. It will make a new one and maybe have some info about why it would crash. You can post that log here using the "Upload a File" button on this forum.
It seems to crash just after generating the planets and just before it should broadcast the fact that the server is ready. Strange. You can still play new AI Skirmish games, right? And if you save those, you can still resume those?
Thanks - yeah, I can load other old saves and create and load new games from saves as well. Not sure what more I can do... so I might have to write this off as a strange bug... but gonna be disappointed if this continues to happen after investing time into a new game :/ Thank you for your help!
Yeah, annoying for you. You seem to have hit upon a bug. If you zip your save and sent it to support@uberent.com, they can probably fix the bug that causes it to crash the server. You can find the files in "%LOCALAPPDATA\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\". Just copy-paste that location in the address bar of Explorer. The save game consists of two files, "AI Skirmish OCT 23 20152.par.gz" and "AI Skirmish OCT 23 20152.par.info.json"
