Huge "history.dat" file

[David Myers]

Only at the beginning of my replay of the 1930s, and already--having generated all of the necessary background fights--the game's history.dat file is 14,996 KB in size.

Perhaps needless to say, a data file that huge really slows things down. Takes a long time to boot. Hangs up when switching between fighters' records.

I've set the options so that .html records of the bouts are not saved, but I noticed, when I opened the data file with a text editor, that the cross-references to these .html records are included in the data file anyway.

Is there some way to compress or reduce the size of the history.dat file? If not, Andreas might want to consider breaking up the file into discrete chunks in a future patch or a future release.

Any other advice would be most welcome.

[Andreas Raht]

Each history record is exactly 455 Bytes "long", plus 8 Byte overhead for the whole file. So you've got ((14996 KB * 1024)-2) / 455 = about 33,750 records in your history file. That's pretty much, and so it's getting slow.

What can we do to prevent that 33,750 records are saved to the history? The problem is the auto-scheduler. I could add a messagebox with a warning when you want to schedule bouts with a "repeat" number bigger than 1 for example.

[David Myers]

Andreas,

But I am not repeating the bouts. I am merely scheduling a lot of them. In my Thirties replay, I have more than 900 active fighters. And I schedule seven bouts a year for each of them.

Just a suggestion, but you might want to adopt the practice of, say, Strat-O-Matic baseball, which creates a separate stat file for each team. Each fighter might have a separate "history.dat" file. The total size of the histories would be just as huge. But the increments would be smaller.

[Andreas Raht]

Yes, that would work...

[JeffR]

One other file problem, Andreas - in the 'Bouts' directory, the game retains a copy of the HTML 'Scheduler Results' file that's generated every time the scheduler is used. It would be nice if there was a 'delete HTML report after viewing' option beside the 'save' and 'update records' one so the file would be automatically deleted after it's sent to the user's browser. Otherwise, the game produces a bunch of useless files that never get deleted unless the user goes in and removes them manually.

[Rasmuth]

So...it is OK to remove those bout html files? I have quite a few and if its OK I'd like to delete them....I also like the above mention idea of having an option in the game to delete them...if they are no longer needed.

[JeffR]

Yeah, should be safe to remove any of the html files that start with 'Scheduler...'.

[Andreas Raht]

Yes, that's safe.

[hoochpit]

I have one other problem that is kind of related to the history.dat file. For some reason, the game crashed, hard, while I was simming bouts. Windows when into emergency mode, blue screen, and I had to reboot the system. Since it was in the middle of simming, the history.dat file was corrupt and could not load when I tried to restart the game. I had to uninstall it and reinstall it. It works now, but I lost countless hours of work building my database. Is this a known problem. Also, where is the history.dat file located, would it be possible for me to manually back it up periodically so if this happens again, I can just overwright the corrupted one with the backup.

Thanks.

[couriers]

To be completely honest that sounds more like a problem with your system and not the game itself. I would venture to guess that you are using Windows Me or 2000. More often than not BSDs (Blue Screens of Death) are caused by memory issues. These can range from having bad memory modules, having a module pop slightly out of whack or just simply not enough memory to handle the requests from the program at any given time.

Either way, you can & should make backups of your databases on a regular basis. All database info is stored within the Title Bout directory inside the Data folder. You can make backups of individual files, database folders, the whole Data folder or the entire Title Bout directory itself.

Best of luck.

[hoochpit]

Thank you very much. I'll do a backup of it. And you are right. It was not a game problem, it was a system problem, and it did come from a memory errror. I've had that problem 1 other time while playing another game. I am running XP with 512k ram and a 2.4 gig processor, but sometimes windows just wants to mess with you. Anyway, I'll do the database backup, from the options menu in the game I am assuming you are referring too. Then, if it happens again, I can just restore the backup and not lose all my game time. Thanks again.

[couriers]

Wow. A BSD from WinXP can be a rare event. Usually XP will either shutdown your programs and default to the desktop or restart the computer. At least that has been my experience. Hopefully you wont have any more problems like this in the future.

The backups need to be done via Windows Explorer. I won't assume that you know how to do that or that you don't know how so I'll wait to see if you need some help. Otherwise, you should be all set to roll.

[hoochpit]

I'm assuming I can just rename a copy of the Data file.

[couriers]

Yes. I usually copy the original folder or file that I want backed-up and then paste it into a Backup Folder in My Documents. Then I rename it to include the date so that the Fighter.dat would become Fighter 01-13-04.bat. Another method is to include a sort of version number so that you would have Fighter v01.dat as the back-up file.

Hope that helps.