So,

i've been playing the 8th mission of the egypt campaign on this day. 2 times the game crashed with an structured error between the 40 and 65 minute mark.

First time i was like "okay, can happen, many ships involved in this mission" so the risk is high that the game can crash - ships have a significant probability to cause errors for players in multiplayer as well. But when it happened again in the 2nd game i got really mad because at this point i wasted my whole evening for nothing.

Thats why i was wondering if we could allow using savegames in longer games to prevent this miserable experience. Something like "if you get an error, you may be allowed to continue from the latest savegame immediately after the game crashed".

Since everything is on video everyone can see that the error happened and that i continued playing with the latest save.

I don't know how many errors you guys encounter in campaigns. Maybe im just super unlucky today because the campaign missions are usually pretty stable compared to multiplayer games. But this particular mission is gonna last something between 90-150 minutes and has - as i said - a higher risk of crashing than most other missions.

I will give the mission another try tomorrow regardless of the result here. But what do you guys think?

Ja, das Problem ist mir auch schon durch den Kopf gegangen und bin zum Glück bisher verschont geblieben, vor allem bei meinen Full-Games. So wäre mein Vorschlag: Dann ist in den Missionen das Speichern erlaubt, der Spielstand darf aber nur geladen werden, wenn eine Fehlermeldung das Programm beendet. Dies muss zwingend bei der Video-Aufnahme festgehalten werden. Weiterhin würde die Ingame-Time zählen. Aber wie ist das (nur zum Vergleich) bei anderen Games? Wenn während einem Speedrun-Versuch das Spiel "crashed" oder "freezed", hat man da nicht einfach Pech gehabt und der Speedrun ist "verloren"?

EDIT: Hab gerade die Regeln bei Command&Conquer geschaut, ein vergleichbares Strategie-Spiel. Dort ist das Speichern/Laden innerhalb der Missionen sogar erlaubt. Das Laden muss aber direkt danach erfolgen, also innerhalb des einen Versuches. Für Siedler 3 halte ich davon aber jetzt auch nicht soooo wahnsinnig viel, da man ja quasi nur noch speichert und lädt, um wichtige Sekunden rauszuholen... Da müsste man auch In-Game-Time und Real-Time separat aufführen...

hey guys,

the whole reason behind taking only ingame time was: it's easy. you just play the game and look at the timer in the end and your done. no additonal timer software needed etc. with this it was logical for me to disallow save + load as it would encourage to load as often as you want as the ingame time does not change. in full game runs save + load is allowed as you only can use real time anyway.

now to the crashes. I only had one crash ever in speedrinning this game and it was in mission 5 which is another mission with many ships involved. in most games I watch speedruns of it is that if the game crashes you are just unlucky and you have to repeat.

for this game I could think of a rule as mentioned before. something like "if the game crashes you may load a savegame of that particular attempt and go on. the save, crash and load must all be shown a singular continuous video. you also need to make sure to mention the crash and its time in the video describtion.".

kingcat, please tell us of the missions continues to crash or if you were just unlucky.

sounds like a good procedure for this case.

I will only get one more try in for this mission today. Starting tomorrow i'm visiting a Settlers3-LAN, so i won't make any runs until next week.

okay, so have fun there!

I guess we can play according to this new rule from now on. I will update the rules on the site soon. if anyone is against this rule please let us know here.

As long as the video recording doesn't crash with the game I think it's fine to restart the game and continue from a save you did during the run. The video will prove that it is played in one session as good as possible. As for the timing: I think the in-game time is fine. If we would allow save and load we would need to switch to real time as those reloading attempts need to count towards the run.