[Bug 355086] [NEW] Wesnoth save game file format in jaunty is incompatible (1.4 -> 1.6) and saves just vanish

[Gerfried Fuchs]

* Gerv <gerv at gerv.net> [2009-04-04 13:36:40 CEST]:
> I have completed 23 out of 25 scenarios in the Wesnoth campaign "Heir to
> the Throne". I then upgraded to the Jaunty beta, which replaces Wesnoth
> 1.4 with 1.6. Now, none of my saved games are available in the GUI, and
> so I can't load them!

 There is a NEWS.Debian entry about that - and it was the same thing
with the upgrade from 1.2 to 1.4. For your convenience I am citing it
here:

wesnoth (1:1.6-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Please be aware what a new stable upstream release of wesnoth means for
    your save games: You won't be able to continue playing from them. The
    reasons for those are several, not limited to these two bigger points:
    - Most of all, balancing changes: Units might have different
      characteristics and thus fights would end differently, or your units
      could move to places they have never seen before (and weren't meant to).
    - Most obvious, changes in the campaigns themself. A unit you kept from a
      former scenario might not be in the campaign anymore, or a whole
      scenario might have been added or removed somewhere in between. Map
      changes also affect multiplayer games.
    Again: You won't be able to continue playing your old save games from
    older stable releases (e.g. 1.4.x). Further updates to 1.6.x will though
    be compatible with this version.

 -- Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda at debian.at>  Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:27:36 +0100

 Unfortunately there is no way to support 1.4 savegames in the 1.6
release. Given that it's already quite big workload to support wesnoth
the way it is currently given pretty regular releases, bug tracking and
long build times I unfortunately don't have the spare time, the
diskspace and the hardware power to support both 1.4 and 1.6
side-by-side, so this is the only path that I can offer at the moment.

> This campaign took rather a long time to play. If this were my only
> computer, I would cry. Fortunately, I have another one and can use rsync
> to move the saves across and finish the campaign. But other people will
> not be so lucky.

 Shouldn't entries in the NEWS.Debian be displayed to people upgrading
their systems? At least, if apt-listchanges is installed, which I hope
most people have nowadays - but unfortunately I can't do much more than
offer documentation about it without abusing other means.

> There needs to be some sort of warning, or a conversion script, or the
> ability to keep 1.4 installed as well... or something!

 See above, a conversion script won't be possible for these reasons.

> Just "losing" all the saved games (although the data remains in the
> Wesnoth directory, at least at first) and not telling the user
> anything is unacceptable IMO.

 I used the means that are there to tell the users about it, and I'm
sorry about the inconvenience, but I fear there's not much more that I
can offer.

 Hope you can enjoy it nevertheless,
Rhonda

-- 
Wesnoth save game file format in jaunty is incompatible (1.4 -> 1.6) and saves just vanish
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/355086
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