Issue with .dat files during PBEM Campaigns

[JohnHale]

On a few occasions, upon completing a Turn I find I do not have a .dat file - a .new file has been created instead.

Simply re-naming it does the trick, thankfully.

Has anyone else come across this?

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by JohnHale

On a few occasions, upon completing a Turn I find I do not have a .dat file - a .new file has been created instead.

Simply re-naming it does the trick, thankfully.

Has anyone else come across this?

You'll only get that if the file encryption process failed for some reason, and this is the first time ever that someone has noted the existence of the brief temporary .new file in 10+ years.

You seem to have struck lucky, and the file held the unencrypted stream data. (Which an opponent could examine with a hex editor). That is not necessarily always to be the case though!.

I would do a disk check on your PC, probably even a full surface scan. That one is an overnight sort of task.

Perhaps your hard disk may be getting rather full?. (It will need the size of the DAT file free times two for the encryption process)

Your PC definitely had a file I/O error of some sort though.

Cheers
Andy

[DRG]

That's that first time anyone has reported that , I didn't even know the game would do that.

Don

[JohnHale]

"I would do a disk check on your PC"

That seems to have worked - thanks!