Game starts loading, then hangs up and freezes.

[carmentavano]

I have already loaded and successfully played 1/2 season so far. Now, all of a sudden the game will open to the main "blue" screen, then when I click on my league, it starts to load everything, until it hits "messages" and then it totally locks up and I have to close it manually. Any ideas ? I just bought it two days ago and now I can't use it all all !!

[Nutlaw]

Which version are you using, please?

Can you load up other leagues?

In the .lg folder of this league, are any of the .dat files listed as having only 0 kb? Check your C:\Documents and Settings\(Owner)\My Documents\Out of the Park Developments\OOTP Baseball 8\data\saved_games folder for your .lg folders.

[carmentavano]

Yes, as a matter of fact my "messages.dat" folder has 0 KB and is the only folder with 0KB. I can load other leagues.

[i2004tor]

I am having this exact same issue. I am running OOTPv2007 with the latest patch.

This is a sporadic issue; sometimes this problem will occur, with the message [Not Responding] appearing on the top of the OOTP loading screen, and I will have to close it manually. And then I'll re-start the computer and sometimes it'll then load properly, and sometimes the same thing will occur.

Any thoughts? Anyone?

[Nutlaw]

Hrm. Which version are you using, please?

[carmentavano]

Which version of what ? I have OOTP 8 running with Windows Vista. I just completed an entire season, finished a playoff game, and now i am frozen at loading messages. The messages seems to be an issue ?

[Tony M]

If you right-click messages.dat and choose properties, is it showing the size of file as 0 bytes?

An empty .dat file in OOTP should be at least one (and generally five) bytes long, as it has a header byte followed by a count int32.

Being 0 bytes long strikes me as a problem. You would need to find a five byte file to replace it with.

[carmentavano]

Any thoughts on how I would do that ? Or why I keep getting this to end up with 0KB ? It let me play an entire season and then started in the playoffs. I'm really thinking I'll never be able to play this game without this happening.

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by carmentavano

Any thoughts on how I would do that ? Or why I keep getting this to end up with 0KB ? It let me play an entire season and then started in the playoffs. I'm really thinking I'll never be able to play this game without this happening.

Have you got the game to auto-save?

Can you back up your league file (as a precaution) as this is not officially supported but at least it might get you to a point where you can run, and see if this is a recurring problem.

Send me a PM with your email address, and I'll send you a 'blank' messages.dat file back.

[carmentavano]

Not sure if the game auto-saves, as I usuually hit the Save Game button now and then. What is a PM?

My email address is : carmentavano@hotmail.com

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by carmentavano

Not sure if the game auto-saves, as I usuually hit the Save Game button now and then. What is a PM?

My email address is : a@a.com

Ah, ok. It'll be set to auto-save at the end of the year automatically then. I was trying to work out why the game might have failed to save the file correctly mid-season, forgetting the obvious click 'Save' option

A PM is like an internal email system on here. If you click on a user name on the left hand side in a thread, a little thing will drop down and one of teh options is 'send a Private Message to this user' or something similar.

Mail sent anyway, so you can probably edit out your email address now lest spiders read it and harvest your email address (assuming that hotmail haven't already given it away!!!

[tetonj]

I'm having a similar issue. The game loads the the Main Menu, but when I load the league, it gets to 87% and just freezes. It never crashes or gives me error messages. However, the game did crash twice previously, both within the last couple of weeks. I am about halfway through a season, playing on a Mac. It is OOTP8, version 8.0.0.13.

I looked in the folders and found a few Zero kb files: message.dat, some playerhistory.txt files, and some .tpl files (box_injuries, etc.). I do not have the league backed up, although I try to save after every game (or so).

I have created a new league, which loaded fine.

Any ideas, ideally not involving trashing the league? I don't really want to start over.

[Nutlaw]

A poster in another thread reminded me of a workable solution for the empty messages.dat issue. If you try simply creating an empty messages.dat file and inserting it into your .lg folder over the old one, your league should load (albeit without any prior messages). If that doesn't work, try creating a brand new league and copy its messages.dat file over.

carmentavano, i2004tor, and tetonj, could you give this a try?

[tetonj]

After swapping the messages.dat file with a 4 kb file from a new league, as suggested, the league loaded just fine. The team record was correct, the stats were correct. Messages were gone, as expected. However, there were two problems.

1) When I tried to back-up the league, it crashed the game. I only tried that once because, well, I want to play.

2) The other problem was that, while all of my team stats for the year were correct, I had a whole new roster (I am playing the career mode, starting the minors and working up). That roster includes 4 of everyone's favorite ghost, Joe Unknown, all SS.

This is not a problem that I really care to fix, unless it's easy. Instead, I'm going to move forward with the new roster, since it's a minor league team in late July, so I'm expecting to lost half my players anyway. But I hope this is not a persistent issue, because I did not have problems with OOTP 2007.

[Nutlaw]

Originally Posted by tetonj

After swapping the messages.dat file with a 4 kb file from a new league, as suggested, the league loaded just fine. The team record was correct, the stats were correct. Messages were gone, as expected. However, there were two problems.

1) When I tried to back-up the league, it crashed the game. I only tried that once because, well, I want to play.

2) The other problem was that, while all of my team stats for the year were correct, I had a whole new roster (I am playing the career mode, starting the minors and working up). That roster includes 4 of everyone's favorite ghost, Joe Unknown, all SS.

This is not a problem that I really care to fix, unless it's easy. Instead, I'm going to move forward with the new roster, since it's a minor league team in late July, so I'm expecting to lost half my players anyway. But I hope this is not a persistent issue, because I did not have problems with OOTP 2007.

It sounds like more than your messages.dat file got messed up at some point with this league. Sorry to hear that. If you've got a backup of your names.dat file, you might be able to swap that in. Otherwise, you may be stuck with the current crop.

[Nutlaw]

As this thread has received no reply in a week, it will be closed for housekeeping reasons. If you need any further help with this matter, please post a link to this thread in Tech Support and we'll do our best to help you work through it. Thanks.