Corrupted Save Game FM 2012

Firstly, have you tried rebooting your device? It's possible that the iPhone may simply be too low on memory to load the save and a reboot could solve this.

If this doesn't work, we're happy to take a look at your save game to try and see what might be wrong with it. Instructions for how to send it to us are here: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/254587-iPhone-How-to-extract-and-send-us-your-save-game-file

I'd just like to check if you've had any occurrences of the device powering off due to running out of battery, as this is a common reason for saves to be corrupted. We recommend regularly saving in one of the manual save slots so that there are always two 'copies' of your game at any one time, which will mean there's always a backup in this type of situation.

yeah i usually do make a manual save, but this time i didnt! its not a memory issue its on an iphone 4 and i had over 300mb free i tried restarting and everything. Ill send the file over asap

The memory issue is NOT to do with free storage space, it can occur if someone doesn't reboot their device for a long period - this can cause fragmentation of the systems memory meaning that even if there is lots of storage space individual applications may not be able to get enough free RAM to operate correctly (especially in the case of heavy applications like FMH).

To fully reboot an iOS device hold down the on/off button for 2-3 seconds until a page appears saying 'swipe to power off', swipe as indicated and the device will power down - then hit the on/off button and it will start again .... this will take a few seconds to undertake (but you may find your devices performance is far better afterwards and it may solve stability issues and perhaps also the save game issue you're seeing).

Thanks for sending the save. We've received it and it won't load here either, so I've now passed it on to the coding team to have a look at.

Just wondering if you can remember if there were a lot of transfers you had recently made/arranged or any unusual transfer behaviour you've seen, as initial indications are that it's something transfer-related that is preventing the save from loading.

A coder's now looked at the save and the transfer data is indeed corrupted. It's an unusual problem that we haven't seen before so we're wondering if you've had problems with low battery, the game unexpectedly exiting or the device powering off at any stage while playing the game?

I'm guessing from what you've said that you don't have an earlier save anywhere that we could also look at?

Rich if off on his xmas holidays now I believe - I'll take a look at the save in a minute and see if I can recover it or not, I'll post here when I've taken a look.

PS - I'm presuming this thread matches to a bug we've got logged; feel free to email me the save game (marc.vaughan@sigames.com) just in case I'm wrong ..

Just for info we do indeed have this occurrence logged, no need to send the save again.

Marc, 10010.

I'm afraid there is a massive chunk of the save missing - most save games are around 3-3.5Mb in size, this one appears considerably smaller implying that the save was interrupted at some point.

The only way this generally occurs is a freak happen-stance where the backup save is copied to the 'completed save' and the phone loses power during this - you've indicated this hasn't happened, the only thing I can think of which might cause something similar would be two phone calls (or possibly text/update messages?) coming in within a few seconds of each other both triggering a simultaneous save (have never tested this - but I've been wracking my mind trying to ascertain a possible cause and thats about all I can come up with I'm afraid) ... possibly myself & QA can 'emulate' this in some manner.

Unfortunately its not going to be possible to restore this save game, I'm sorry this is the case and I will continue to investigate to try and work out exactly how this could have occurred - I would always suggest saving manually to a slot sporadically just in case and for a future update I'm considering making the game 'rotate' its automatic save game files so that people will (hopefully) always have a safe save game available to load from even if something like this somehow occurs.

(so you're aware its outside of office hours and I need to take my son out in a bit (Magic the Gathering tournament at a local game store, thanks for asking - and yes I am considering playing myself ) - so I might not be able to reply further to this thread tonight, I will read it when I return though)