Savegame compatibility

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Thomas
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Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2005 11:53 am
Location: Germany
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Savegame compatibility

Post by Thomas »

Hi,

since we are a (the one and only? :) ) homepage, hosting some ScummVM-Savegames (LucasArts) there is question regarding this posting from Eugene
sev wrote:Neither saves nor scummvm.ini are backwards compatible.
=> Are the savegames upwards compatible?
If not: was there ever a change in the sources so that savegames from eg 0.7.1 won't run with newer versions?


Thomas
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eriktorbjorn
ScummVM Developer
Posts: 3560
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:39 am

Re: Savegame compatibility

Post by eriktorbjorn »

Thomas wrote: => Are the savegames upwards compatible?
If not: was there ever a change in the sources so that savegames from eg 0.7.1 won't run with newer versions?
Well... for most game engines, savegames haven't really changed much, so they should be ok. For the SCUMM engine, things are complicated because it supports so many different revisions of the game engine. When a new feature is added, sometimes new information needs to be stored in the savegames.

ScummVM usually does a pretty good job of reading savegames from older versions, but it can't read savegames from newer versions. Of course, the older the savegame is, the greater the risk that compatibility broke somewhere along the way, despite our best efforts. Sometimes bugs in the game engine cause bad information to be stored. For instance, we used to have endless problems with the variables keeping track of the drafts in EGA Loom getting overwritten with bogus data.

But to the best of my knowledge, it's been a very long time since we deliberately broke savegame compatibility for any of the officially supported games.
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