How do you transfer save files for Caravan storage?

[natnit]

Originally Posted by SoulSeekkor

All I did when moving to Vista was put everything back on the characters, and anything I couldn't fit (or that was in the shared storage) on a few mule characters.

Yeah, if I hadn't been copying files in a hurry, I'd have done the same.

All's well though, since I managed to get everything working.

[Krethgar]

OK guys, this is my first ever post so go easy on me!!

After a few days of frustration of not seeing my storage area when I upgraded from XP to Vista, I was finally able to retrieve my caravan.

First part of the method is mandatory while the second part is optional though I recommend it you do it if you don't want any problems in your system (I doubt any problem should happen though).

First, you should have your old winsys.dxb and winsys.dxg files of course.

Sometimes Vista can ask for administrator privileges, if it bugs you just turn user access control off.

1) A naive attempt ot deleting Documents and Settings folder will not work, because Vista has a junction (link) to Users directory with the same name. So make sure you see hidden and system files first, then delete the Documents and Settings junction.

2) Now create Documents and Settings folder.

3) The folder name in winsys.dxb should be exactly same in your current installation. So make sure you use the same user name. So create the User directory with the name in the winsys.dxb file. So you need to have a directory like this
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\My Documents


4) The save games in TQ goes to the default My Games directory in Windows. By changing your default my documents directory you can change my games directory as well. Make sure you backup important files in your Documents directory first.
Now, right click on Documents directory in c:\USERS\YOUR NAME\ and Go to Location tab change the directory to
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\My Documents
Windows will ask whether you want to move your default Documents directory and the files in it. Answer yes to each question.

5) Once the documents folder is moved, copy your TQ save files to My Games.

Play and check if you see your caravan.

-------------------------------------------------
Optional:
You will probably be able to play the game, however your default Documents directory is changed. Also there might be some problems with some Vista incompatible programs because you created a Documents and Settings directory and deleted the junction (I have not seen any though). Anyway if you want the old Vista setup do the following.
6) In TQ, create mule characters and empty your caravan and storage areas (long long long time!!!)
7) When you do this, you don't need the caravan file anymore, change your default documents as in 4, but by using Users\YOUR NAME\Documents this time
8) When the files are copied, delete Documents and Settings Folder.
9) Create a junction or symbolic link to Users directory.
For symbolic link Open console (cmd) and type
mklink /d "C:\Documents and Settings" "C:\Users"
AFAIK, Vista does not come with a program for creating junctions, you can get one from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys.../Junction.mspx
Extract the junction.exe file to C: and from console type
junction "C:\Documents and Settings" C:\Users"

Create either a symbolic link or junction not both (I doubt you can create both anyway). I suggest you create a junction.


I hope you will be able to retrieve your caravan. By the way I am not responsible any loss of files, information, etc in your Vista setup or in Documents directory. Use it at your own risk.

Krethgar

[Amandil]

Yaar! I installed Vista and ran titan quest with my My Docs on a different drive letter. I read this thread and moved my my docs back to the drive letter they were on under XP.

My winsys.dxb and winsys.dxg files are showing the correct path without me editing them.

Is my caravan storage hosed or is there still hope?

[WilliamG]

Just encountered this wonderful "feature" of TQ. Along with the rubber-banding, this is just awesome. Not. I've lost all my caravan stuff with no way to get it back. Yay.

[Equisilus]

The only thing that has kept me from continuing my 17 current characters and starting more is that I am now dual-booting WinXP with Vista. Why does that stop me? Because I spend almost all my time in Vista and the difficulty in transfering my characters, the saves, and the entire caravan without a time-consuming workaround just isn't worth it right now. I can just go back to XP and play, but I'm moving on to other things that I can do in Vista without a hassle anyway. If TQ transfer was easy then I'd probably have done it and continued without a hitch.

Not really a compaint, just an observation about it.

[Ian J. Einman]

I have a fix for this: http://www.einman.com/files/TQCaravanFix.rar

Assuming you have just copied all of your files over, run this tool and it should fix the path names and checksums. If your caravan was already eaten by TQ, copy all of the winsys.dxg and winsys.dxb files from your backup again, and then run the tool.

[SoulSeekkor]

That checksum would be extremely handy for both my Defiler and Bman's TQ Vault, any chance that it will be shared?

[Ian J. Einman]

Due to the fact I ripped off some code out of a commercial project from my day job, I can't give out the entire source without culling it some, but I'll tell you what I did.

The first 4 bytes of the caravan file are just a CRC32 of the rest of the file data. CRC32 is an industry-standard algorithm. The CRC32 function I used was inverted, so I started with ~0 as the seed, and then binary inverted (~) the final checksum. You may not have to do that depending on which CRC32 function you use, I think the function we use in our code is backwards.

Obviously you need to replace the file name with the new path. For the character storage files, this is simple. Just put the current path name in (and replace the length DWORD). You will notice that there appears to be a mix of forward and backward slashes in normal caravan files, it doesn't seem to matter which way they go.

For the shared transfer area, this is tougher. I had to replace \SaveData\Sys\ with //SaveData/Sys// to get it to work. There appears to be a required double-slash after Sys and perhaps also before SaveData.

You can also just use the program as binary if you want, I don't really care.

[SoulSeekkor]

Thanks, that helps! I've tried different checksums in the hex program I have but nothing seems to come up with the same value. As long as I know that the checksum represents the entire file minus the 1st four bytes I should be able to come up with some way to find it (I hope). Thanks for the info.

Soul

[Ian J. Einman]

Try this algorithm:

http://burtleburtle.net/bob/c/crc.c

However, start with ~0 for the seed, and then invert the result. For example:

checksum = ~crc(data, data_length, ~0);

And yes, it is a checksum of the remainder of the file excluding the first 4 bytes.