Will this be the last (planned) savegame break before 2.3-final?
Last planned savegame break in trunk before final 2.3.
Maybe we will do one more in the 2.3 branch (once it is created) when we remove unfinished/non-working items. I'll see if we can do that without breaking the saves again..
And what bugs do expect in the savegame_break-branch?
How can I find them? Or should I play, till something happens?
Maybe savegame bugs?
Seriously, our save system returns default values if the given property was not found so if you see that something returned to zero that's most probably a bug. I've fixed one of this type about alien interests, no UFOs came as interest levels always returned to zero on load.
Play much! I would say you can even cheat (debug commands) in missions from testing's point of view, only the result will affect savegame (if you lost team member, interest level and happiness change, looted items and alien bodies).
Do Save-Load-Save check sometimes: Save slot1, load slot1, save slot2, compare slot1.sdmp and slot2.sdmp.
Set
save_compressed to 0 so We can hack the savegame to find a cure.
debug_list* console commands can be useful for checking ingame data.
Unicode: There was a
bug about multibyte unicode characters in saves. That's fixed in
savegame_break branch too but I couldn't prove it's correctness. So playing on non-latin scripted languages (especially Russian) is welcome too.
Always check the console after loading the game. Any warnings can be important.
Use rolling-save trick: first save at slot 0, later slot1...n then from 0 again. With this technique you can hopefully provide earlier saves too in case the bug is not obvious and must be caught right when it's happening.
ps. This ended to be a big testing-idea list. I hope you don't mind and find (much?) useful info in it.
Thanks for your help!
-geever