Did Hexen-Plus break savegames?

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I've been having an issue with saved games in Hexen-Plus where the game "forgets" various things in the save, resulting in a broken game state.  At first I wondered if it was some weird problem with my custom maps, but I recently confirmed that it can happen in the Hexen IWAD as well.  Start a game, complete the Winnowing Hall (use cheats if you want to make it faster, doesn't seem to matter), enter Seven Portals and progress a little bit, then save.  When you reload (shouldn't need to exit the game first, but try it if you don't see an effect) you may pop back to the entrance of the map with various scripted things broken.

 

I double checked that I'm using v1.1.5 (which seems to be the most current version as far as I can tell).  Can anyone confirm that this is a universal bug with the patch, and not that I'm somehow doing something else stupid to cause this?

[plums]

I can confirm that Hexen-Plus doesn't load my savegames properly. I didn't experience any script breakage but I might just not have progressed enough.

 

Hexen128 doesn't seem to have the same problems, though I don't think it does anything besides raise limits (and includes a -novert parameter it seems like novert is just built in and can't be turned off), unlike Hexen+ which adds a bunch of stuff. To use it I needed to increase my dosbox memory size (64 mb worked fine, don't know what the minimum is). I assume you're also using dosbox -- no idea about getting it to run with a classic DOS machine.

Edited September 28, 2023 by plums

[fabian]

There is a chance that Hexen savegames are already corrupted when they are stored, so Hexen-plus probably just ships around that (to prevent segmentation faults on operating systems with protected memory)?

 

https://github.com/fabiangreffrath/crispy-doom/commit/06b70f1345e9aa89e6846144d9e1d4d9db484574

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

8 hours ago, fabian said:

There is a chance that Hexen savegames are already corrupted when they are stored, so Hexen-plus probably just ships around that (to prevent segmentation faults on operating systems with protected memory)?

Ok.  Is anything known about why the saves get messed up?  Like is it related to the well-known Doom savegame bug, or is it a wholly discrete issue from that?

[PVS]

I don’t remember any problems with savegames in HeXen under DOS and Win9x. In Hexen-Plus I remember that sometimes (or always) he could not correctly load savegame in the first time in one work session, but if try load it again, then - it always load normally.

ETTiNGRiNDER
I tested Hexen-Plus it according to your scenario - and have the same thing as I wrote above: any first load in work session - is fails, but second load and further - always normal. Main savegames Hexen-Plus create correctly for me, but in the first load he does not correctly copy savegames in working slots 6 and 7 and for some reason uses them? Which is not clear.

This may be a consequence of the undocumented fix in Hexen-Plus (or this is happen by accident): fix the original HeXen -warp command. When, for example, you use -warp 07 -skill 4 -class 0 and die on this map07, then HeXen do reborn always on map01 and skill-1, because forgot create a working savegame slot for -warp command. If use -warp 01 -skill 4 on unknown map and die on this first map - possible even not notice, that game now on skill-1, after reborn, heh

In any case, need to ask Hexen-Plus author, of course, what exactly he changed regarding savegames, but I doubt he remembers anything about this.