Yet another in an intermittent string of technical problems with VASSAL…
Up to ~1 month ago, my opponent and I swapped save files (extensionless) and they loaded. Module was Victory in the Pacific.
Around 1 month ago, new opponent’s saves received the extension .DAT and the Vassal here doesn’t recognize them. Loads the module OK, then “Unable to load saved game”
Opponent still recognizes the extensionless saves I send.
Just upgraded from 3.0.5 to 3.1.0 and the same problem remains.
(Another warning !! Don’t let Windows do the periodic auto-cleanup of downloaded files, since it deletes the Vassal installation under Java too. Happened twice so far…)
Can you email on to me at b.easton at exemail.com.au. My first guess is that they are not actually Vassal save games, your opponent is re-zipping them or otherwise processing them (perhaps unknown to him).
What extension your save files have has no effect on whether they will load.
(I would suggest using .vsav, however.) Only the data contained inside them
matters for that.
What module are you using? Could you post one of the save files here so
we can have a look at it?
OK, this example of .DAT comes from the VIP27b02.mod
(I further added the extension .ZIP by hand to the .DAT saved from the attachment, since this forum says “The Extension dat is not allowed”). SAV, TXT or no extension are not allowed either.
The save file you uploaded is corrupted, but in a very particular way: The
first two bytes are garbage, but after that there is an otherwise correctly
formatted save file. If I remove the first two bytes of the file, I have
no problem loading it in VASSAL 3.1.0.
My suspicion is that the save file was fine when your opponent created it,
but that his email program corrupted it. Have him mail a known-good save
file back to himself and see if he can read it after getting it back out
of his mail client. If that works, then it might be your email program which
is the culprit.