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Getting info from save game

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2013 4:09 pm
by zalasur
I have a save file containing a galaxy that I would like to recreate from scratch with a more aggressive AI setting, but I can't for the life of me remember what my new game parameters were (specifically, the number of systems). Of course, in the time since I created that game, I've generated other more different galaxies so the original information on disk was overwritten. :oops: I looked at logs, did a "strings" and various greps on the binary save file, and looked around on the forums, but couldn't find an easy answer for this. Is there a way to pull this information from the save file?

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2013 6:57 pm
by Geoff the Medio
Number of systems isn't stored in the save as a separate number, but you could count them manually, or attach a debugger and have a look at the size of a container with just systems in it.

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2013 7:03 pm
by zalasur
Geoff the Medio wrote:Number of systems isn't stored in the save as a separate number, but you could count them manually, or attach a debugger and have a look at the size of a container with just systems in it.
I thought about that (I was attempting to do that when I would run "strings S0001.sav" on it), but counting them proved difficult since there was a lot of noise in the signal. Is there a specific pattern I should look for?

As far as using a debugger goes, is there one that runs on the MacOS X platform I could use?

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2013 7:29 pm
by zalasur
Ah ha, I found it. It was an Irregular Galaxy, with the number of systems set to 71 :mrgreen:

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2013 12:28 pm
by em3
Geoff the Medio wrote:Number of systems isn't stored in the save as a separate number, but you could count them manually, or attach a debugger and have a look at the size of a container with just systems in it.
Are the number of system always equal to the number specified during generation or is it a top limit of some probabilistic distribution?

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2013 3:48 pm
by eleazar
em3 wrote:Are the number of system always equal to the number specified during generation or is it a top limit of some probabilistic distribution?
The numbers are not always exactly the same, IIRC due to arcane galaxy gen stuff.

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:47 pm
by Geoff the Medio
eleazar wrote:
em3 wrote:Are the number of system always equal to the number specified during generation or is it a top limit of some probabilistic distribution?
The numbers are not always exactly the same, IIRC due to arcane galaxy gen stuff.
I suspect but cannot guarantee that it would mostly be an issue for smaller galaxies with more AIs. At the least, there's an enforced minimum number of stars per AI, and there is also a chance for an imprecise number of stars if it can't find suitable places for them, which I think would mainly affect small numbers of stars.

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2013 10:44 am
by em3
What I mean is that if the actual number of stars is different from the value entered in the form, then possibly if you try to re-create the universe by counting the stars you might get a different universe... or not?

Re: Getting info from save game

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 7:21 pm
by zalasur
What might be helpful is have the meta-game information saved in each save file (I can't imagine the data being more than a couple hundred bytes so it shouldn't waste much space even if the same exact data was stored in each individual file). If that could happen, then a "recreate galaxy" option could be added when creating a new world.