Blazemod save-compatibility break incoming

Game Talk The Lab
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Hey there guys, me again here with big news about blazemod.

First up thanks to everyone who gave feedback in the previous thread on discourse and elsewhere, it’s really been a huge help.

Now to get into the meat of it: my overall PR for modernising blazemod is now finished on github for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. It will not be getting committed as one part however. Over the week I’m going to be opening PR’s doing different sections of the overall changes in bite-size format so that the changes are easier to review for the developers.

What this means for you, the player however, is that if you’re using the change to the obsolete tag (as blazemod is currently obsolete) while playing latest experimental, that it will break save-game compatibility probably with the first PR being committed, and probably a couple of times inbetween as well until the final changes to bring it up to date are finished.

Basically, saves with blazemod in them are going to break, repeatedly, for about a week or so while it’s being brought up to standard. If you play latest experimental, this is a heads up and warning of such.

The end result has been somewhat extensively tested by myself and some fantastic volunteers, though I will still be looking forward to feedback once it’s done.

There will be more additions and changes to blazemod in the future once this modernisation is done, hopefully without any need to break save-game compatibility- most of the reason it’s happening now are practices with regards to the ID’s of content that has been added that have not aged well, as well as other conventions, and some of the stuff being outright redundant by now, but still in the game.

For those curious, the PR’s will also include a quick hotfix to the tankmod still in the repo, which is dependent on blazemod. That mod itself is in a weird place and while military vehicular content will want to be integrated into the basegame more than it is currently, implementation will have to be seriously improved. There are loose plans around this, but not a current priority.

Questions and feedback are welcome, the PR has most if not all considerations in the form of comments, both on the PR and the code within the PR itself. Future ideas for blazemod are discussed a little bit more in the comments at the previously linked discourse thread. There is also feedback on a reddit post around the same time, and a new one that is a mirror of this thread.

Anywho, hope this information is useful to people, again just ask if you have any questions.

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So this will break the save-game compatibility even if no vehicle parts/turrets are installed and up and running?Can some save files be edited to remove the items if they were spawned and accidentally caused a crash or segmentation error?

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but when i checked the mod files on official GitHub repository, it still had the old format with old files with no folders, it was completely different from your updated mod, i believe that old files can be safely deleted since they’re absent in your updated version, just reminding in case no one noticed this :slight_smile:

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From my testing, segfault can probably be avoided if you haven’t put installed any of the turrets added by blazemod, or installed any of the turretframes added by it. The only mod that adds turretframes to normal generation is tankmod, which has both the old turretframe and new turret mount in vanilla, and for some reason removing the turretframe while the vanilla mount exists is fine, though it will throw an error the first time they’ll get deleted each time you come across one. There will be a fix for that as well, removing the turretframe from tankmod.

It helps that blazemod turrets are not generated in the world, but if you’ve got a save where you’ve left behind a vehicle where you can’t take them off, it might be unsalvageable.

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So does that mean we can currently download the version of blaze mod you are working on?

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I would suggest against it for anyone using blazemod right now. It’ll throw errors and delete items while I’m doing this, and you won’t be able to use any of the vehicle parts for fear that they’ll get removed and the game will throw a segfault the next time you load a vehicle you’ve attached parts to.

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Forgive the double post, but to expand on this: If you keep playing over the week without updating (or however long it takes), and then once the final part of the rework is in place you uninstall all blazemod parts from any vehicle you’ve put them on, then update, some stuff will probably get deleted but the game might not segfault. Might.

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This is how I approach situations like this one:
0. Backup everything I might regret losing.

  1. Remove and disassemble or at least destroy items that I suspect might cause trouble. Alternatively update, try to load, study error logs and/or stack traces if applicable and handle affected items.
  2. Sometimes items can’t be deconstructed or even destroyed (because fumaroles spawn abysmally seldom now, for example) so I just add a temporary deconstruction recipe to an “ideas testing mod” which I have added to every world and kept empty (just the bare modinfo) most of the time.
  3. Remove temporary deconstruction recipe references from the save game data if necessary.
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i like my slime cars, so maybe i will just wait until everuthing is done to update, that way i will not have to backup everything all the time

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Hi SouP, how is the update going?
As im eagerly looking forwards to playign with an old schools mobile fortress.