STARK: "Could not copy the savegame to a new slot" when trying to move save to make room for autosave

[Thunderforge]

If a savegame is in the first save slot (say, for the Prologue), when an autosave will be created, the following message appears:

WARNING: The autosave slot has a saved game named Prologue. You can either move the existing save to a new slot, Overwrite the existing save, or cancel autosave (will not prompt again until restart)

There are three buttons: "Move", "Overwrite", and "Cancel autosave". Whenever I click "Move", I get the following error:

ERROR: Could not copy the savegame to a new slot

To make matters worse, nothing appears in scummvm.log regarding this interaction.

Reproduction

1. Start The Longest Journey
2. Either start a new game or load a save game
3. Create a save in the first slot (i.e. the one in the top-left)
4. Wait until the dialog pops up. It seems some actions postpone an autosave, like being in conversation. Reading April's diary seems to be an action that does not block it.

I would like to see a solution that

1. Does not cause an error when clicking the "Move" button
2. Provides logs for this warning and the errors

Versions

• ScummVM: Windows x64 Daily 2021-09-22
• The Longest Journey: Steam + Fonts from demo on ScummVM site

[eriktorbjorn]

Perhaps similar to this Starship Titanic bug? https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/12951

[macca8]

@thunderforge, just to clarify, the warning message is an addition to the Autosave System (introduced with PR 3261), that's triggered if the Autosave slot is occupied by a non-autosave saved game when an autosave is attempted.

The Autosave System has always operated on the basis that an autosave will never overwrite any user-created saved game that may be occupying the Autosave slot. Previously, this resulted in the autosave failing silently, and it was left to the user to firstly, become aware of the situation, and secondly, remove the non-autosave saved game from the autosave slot, to enable the autosave to proceed.

This warning message now alerts the user of the presence of the non-autosave saved game, and attempts to offer solutions to allow the autosave to proceed successfully. Unfortunately, as you've found out, some of these solutions don't necessarily work with all game engines. Either way, the warning message is a great addition, but there's room for improvement in the messaging, and I seriously believe that Move and Cancel are the only options needed in the dialog, but that's just my opinion.

For the record, the manual method for removing a non-autosave saved game from the autosave slot is to load the saved game, save to another slot, then delete the original saved game from the autosave slot.