Space Quest 6 - crashes on loading saved games

[SeanW49]

I was playing Space Quest 6 in the latest official buiild of ScummVM and around when I made it to being locked up in the brig, it started to crash with an error message on loading a saved game. I noticed in the message something about creating an item. I reinstalled ScummVM and the game, it was going fine until I saved at the arcade before playing Stooge Fighter III after reading the cheat sheet, and it happened again. I have a legal copy of the game from Good Old Games. I've attached all my saved games on this current playthrough including the Arcade one that crashed. I was looking forward to playing Space Quest 6 in ScummVM again because I read the missing points were finally added to the game, but if this can't be fixed I'll have to play in Dosbox. Thank you for your time.

[sluicebox]

Hello! Thank you for reporting this and including save game files. This seems like a suspiciously rapid response but I just randomly checked the tracker a few minutes after you posted =)

I can reproduce this with your "Arcade" save on the GOG release. The challenge here is to reproduce creating broken saves before you understandably get impatient and go with dosbox. I bought this game on a crazy mail order sale from Sierra when I was 14 and I remember that impatience acutely.

Questions about which methods you've been using to create saves:

1. Have you been using the ScummVM save screen or the original SQ6 in-game save screen?
2. Have you been launching the save screen by pressing F5, or clicking the Control and Save buttons in-game, or by the ScummVM screen that appears when pressing CTRL+F5 and has a Save button.

[sluicebox]

I can reproduce creating broken saves that crash like yours with the CTRL+F5 \ Save feature, so I'm going to assume that's what's happening.

If that's what's going on, then short version: don't use that feature. Only save by pressing F5 or by pressing the Control button in-game and then the Save button. It's my opinion that the CTRL+F5 \ Save button is too unstable to have released, because it allows saving in ways that didn't occur in original games so it creates save states that could never have occurred and therefore crash in unpredictable ways we can't prevent.

[eriktorbjorn]

I wonder if https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/15212 is in any way related, or if that's just wishful thinking on my part.

Though that one happened even when triggering ScummVM's save dialog with the in-game button, so maybe not.

[SeanW49]

Thank you for looking into this so quickly! I'll take your advice and save with the in game control panel. That's what I was trying to do on this new playthrough but I think I might of fell back to old habits and used CTRL-F5 because that's how I normally save a game. I'll try to remember not to. Again, thank you so much and I'll let you know if I have any more corrupt saves in the future. :-)

[sluicebox]

Great! I am confident that you won't hit this again; it's specific to CTRL+F5 \ Save.

Leaving this open until something is done about it.

This is unrelated to #15212, whose cause is also known.

[SeanW49]

I just finished the game with only using the save button in the in-game control panel. No more issues at all! Thanks for the help. :-)