04-09-2014, 09:43 AM
Greetings,
Bear with me as this will be a tad long and it might even be completely wrong, but here are my observations on this issue...
Recently I've been playing Growlanser II Sense of Justice. If anyone has played it with the PCSX2 then they have undoubtedly run into the issue of the game freezing.
While the majority of the freezing involved in this game has been fixed there is still an issue where the game will freeze when you attempt to save your game using the in-game save system.
Whenever this occurs you are left with no choice except to load a previously successfully saved game and hope for better luck on your next save attempt.
If you use save states and whatever causes the save freeze to "trigger" was set off to occur on your next save attempt... well the save state kindly saves that as well and now that save state when loaded will always result in the save freeze occurring.
I tried looking around for a possible solution or workaround, but to no avail. I've tried just about everything from settings, to plugins, to gamefixes, etc.
I have had some remarkable luck so far in finding ways to cope with the issue and get past particularly annoying sections of freezing, but I'll save that for a section at the very end of this post.
The reason I'm posting here is that I noticed something odd, which is quite possibly just coincidence, but it seems to occur regularly when the game is in the "will freeze on next save attempt" state.
When you save your game it seems to be using the Playstation 2's internal clock to put a timestamp on the save file. This is unlike most other games I've seen which tend to use their own timer which tracks how long it has been since you started playing the game.
The majority of the time when playing my save games have the correct date shown, although the time is always way off.
One interesting thing I've noticed though is that so long as my save file is showing the correct date the in-game save system tends to work without a hitch. So long as I see the date showing I can play for hours and save countless times without incident.
However, when the save freezing creeps in I've noticed my save games show everything in their time / date stamp as being 0. So literally the game save shows as being (0/0/0000 - 00:00).
Initially, I though that this was occurring because attempting to save and having it freeze would somehow error out the time stamp on that save slot.
After a bunch of playing and observing though I've noticed that this doesn't seem to be the case. I'm somewhat starting to think it may be linked to the cause of the issue in some way.
I've noticed that the zeroed out timestamp occurs even when the game saves just fine without a freeze. However, when you see this you're in for a hair tearing session of save game freezes in your immediate future.
In an effort to further test my theory that the timestamp was somehow linked to the save freezing issue I set PCSX2 to load without a disc in and changed my playstation 2 clock.
Unfortunately, I ran into another issue when I did this, specifically, the issue being that the time does not save properly.
I can change the date and that will save. I can also toggle between a 12-hour and 24-hour clock. All of these will be the same when I run PCSX2 again without a disc and check the clock settings. Except of course for the time itself... which always seems to be set to exactly the same time every single time I load up the systems settings to change it.
So in short... my post here is to ask these questions...
Is it possible that the Growlanser save game freeze could be linked to the fact that it uses the playstation 2's clock which doesn't save properly?
Why doesn't the playstation 2 clock save the time even though it saves the date? Is this a glitch or oversight or some such? Is it possible that somewhere the time is being set to a certain time at every launch and therefore overwriting any changes that are made to the clock?
Is there a way to change and actually save the clock setting? Even something like editing a file would suffice.
Where is the playstation clock information being saved / stored?
Is there a setting or something that I can use to have PCSX2 show me the playstation 2s clock information while I'm running a game? For example, is there an option that will cause it to post this information to the log or some other way to view this clock through PCSX2 while a game is running?
Thanks in advance for any assistance or information that can be provided.
As stated earlier in this post I've managed to do pretty good with dealing with the save freezing so far so I figure I'll share what I know to help others who are trying to play to cope with this issue...
Turn off the Speedhacks. All of them. Its unlikely that this will cause any change what-so-ever in the rate at which the freezing occurs, but it won't hurt to be on the safe side. You're not likely to notice any performance hit in this game by turning them off either.
Stop worrying about your graphics settings. The freezing will occur in either software or hardware mode. Additionally, don't worry about your games speed either as that doesn't factor in. The game will freeze regardless of if you are playing at the standard 60 fps or have it on turbo and are hitting around 120 fps.
Don't use save states. It can be tempting due to all of the multiple choice situations the game gives you, but its pretty much a guarantee that you won't be saving your game after you load that save state. The games actual save system allows you to save at any map location and during battles so you can still use the in-game saves to cherry-pick your game choices if you so choose.
(Alternatively, if you don't care about actually having a physical save on your memory card and are willing to risk the chance that your save state will become corrupted in some fashion you can choose to avoid the save game freezing all together by playing entirely using save states. If that's the case... then just ignore this whole post and hope your save states don't get messed.)
Use more than one save slot. In general I'd recommend that you use at least 3. One save slot that you save in whenever a major event occurs such as moving on to a new "chapter" in the game. One to use as your general purpose saving while on the games map. And, the other slot to use for in battle saves. This should give you enough flexibility that you can get around even the most stubborn save freezing.
Save like you have OCD. One of two things is going to happen when you attempt to save your game... it will either work and all is well in the world... or the game will freeze. If you are saving often you have a greater chance of having a more recent save to fall back on. There is no good reason to hold off on saving as it will not in any way lessen the chances of a freeze. In fact it will just cause you to lose more progress... whenever whatever it is that "triggers" the game to freeze on your next attempt occurs it will not go away so don't avoid saving.
Pay attention to your time stamps. So long as your save game is showing a date and time you're likely going to have smooth sailing. If you notice that the date and time is all zeros then you're in for a roller coaster ride of save game freezes.
So... what do you do when you run into a save game freeze?
First, don't panic. Your save game isn't ruined... well the one you were trying to save at the time is gone... but the save slot itself won't be corrupted or anything. You can safely load that slot and play from it although you will have lost any progress since you last successfully saved, which is why you need to be work pre-emptively and save often.
Second, try to find the "trigger" that causes your next save attempt to freeze.
If its something specific like a certain event that after seeing you can't save then try doing things and saving a bunch and coming back to it. Many times you can get past it by doing this. For instance you could sleep in a towns inn, fight a battle, gather information (even if you already saw it before), etc. Sometimes just doing any other activity will allow you to save afterwards and when returning to the event you may be able to then save after it is done.
If you're on the games map and just about anything that you do (sleeping at inns, triggering events, etc...) seems to result in your game freezing afterwards then your best bet is to save a game in battle. Usually after the battle you can save on the map again, though as mentioned above avoid having all your saves be in battle.
In the event that you end up in a really rough patch where your game constantly seems to be freezing when attempting to save the first thing you should do is check if the timestamps are zeroed. If they are then fight a random battle and try saving in battle, then try saving on the map. Keep repeating this process of saving in battle then on the map until your save games start showing an actual date and time. If sleeping at an inn won't let you save after then avoid sleeping at inns and just continue this cycle. Once you see the time and date on the save slots again you should be mostly past that big block of save freezes and it should be moderately safe to continue on with the rest of the game an events.
That's everything I can think of off the top of my head. I hope this helps anyone else who is trying to play.
Bear with me as this will be a tad long and it might even be completely wrong, but here are my observations on this issue...
Recently I've been playing Growlanser II Sense of Justice. If anyone has played it with the PCSX2 then they have undoubtedly run into the issue of the game freezing.
While the majority of the freezing involved in this game has been fixed there is still an issue where the game will freeze when you attempt to save your game using the in-game save system.
Whenever this occurs you are left with no choice except to load a previously successfully saved game and hope for better luck on your next save attempt.
If you use save states and whatever causes the save freeze to "trigger" was set off to occur on your next save attempt... well the save state kindly saves that as well and now that save state when loaded will always result in the save freeze occurring.
I tried looking around for a possible solution or workaround, but to no avail. I've tried just about everything from settings, to plugins, to gamefixes, etc.
I have had some remarkable luck so far in finding ways to cope with the issue and get past particularly annoying sections of freezing, but I'll save that for a section at the very end of this post.
The reason I'm posting here is that I noticed something odd, which is quite possibly just coincidence, but it seems to occur regularly when the game is in the "will freeze on next save attempt" state.
When you save your game it seems to be using the Playstation 2's internal clock to put a timestamp on the save file. This is unlike most other games I've seen which tend to use their own timer which tracks how long it has been since you started playing the game.
The majority of the time when playing my save games have the correct date shown, although the time is always way off.
One interesting thing I've noticed though is that so long as my save file is showing the correct date the in-game save system tends to work without a hitch. So long as I see the date showing I can play for hours and save countless times without incident.
However, when the save freezing creeps in I've noticed my save games show everything in their time / date stamp as being 0. So literally the game save shows as being (0/0/0000 - 00:00).
Initially, I though that this was occurring because attempting to save and having it freeze would somehow error out the time stamp on that save slot.
After a bunch of playing and observing though I've noticed that this doesn't seem to be the case. I'm somewhat starting to think it may be linked to the cause of the issue in some way.
I've noticed that the zeroed out timestamp occurs even when the game saves just fine without a freeze. However, when you see this you're in for a hair tearing session of save game freezes in your immediate future.
In an effort to further test my theory that the timestamp was somehow linked to the save freezing issue I set PCSX2 to load without a disc in and changed my playstation 2 clock.
Unfortunately, I ran into another issue when I did this, specifically, the issue being that the time does not save properly.
I can change the date and that will save. I can also toggle between a 12-hour and 24-hour clock. All of these will be the same when I run PCSX2 again without a disc and check the clock settings. Except of course for the time itself... which always seems to be set to exactly the same time every single time I load up the systems settings to change it.
So in short... my post here is to ask these questions...
Is it possible that the Growlanser save game freeze could be linked to the fact that it uses the playstation 2's clock which doesn't save properly?
Why doesn't the playstation 2 clock save the time even though it saves the date? Is this a glitch or oversight or some such? Is it possible that somewhere the time is being set to a certain time at every launch and therefore overwriting any changes that are made to the clock?
Is there a way to change and actually save the clock setting? Even something like editing a file would suffice.
Where is the playstation clock information being saved / stored?
Is there a setting or something that I can use to have PCSX2 show me the playstation 2s clock information while I'm running a game? For example, is there an option that will cause it to post this information to the log or some other way to view this clock through PCSX2 while a game is running?
Thanks in advance for any assistance or information that can be provided.
As stated earlier in this post I've managed to do pretty good with dealing with the save freezing so far so I figure I'll share what I know to help others who are trying to play to cope with this issue...
Turn off the Speedhacks. All of them. Its unlikely that this will cause any change what-so-ever in the rate at which the freezing occurs, but it won't hurt to be on the safe side. You're not likely to notice any performance hit in this game by turning them off either.
Stop worrying about your graphics settings. The freezing will occur in either software or hardware mode. Additionally, don't worry about your games speed either as that doesn't factor in. The game will freeze regardless of if you are playing at the standard 60 fps or have it on turbo and are hitting around 120 fps.
Don't use save states. It can be tempting due to all of the multiple choice situations the game gives you, but its pretty much a guarantee that you won't be saving your game after you load that save state. The games actual save system allows you to save at any map location and during battles so you can still use the in-game saves to cherry-pick your game choices if you so choose.
(Alternatively, if you don't care about actually having a physical save on your memory card and are willing to risk the chance that your save state will become corrupted in some fashion you can choose to avoid the save game freezing all together by playing entirely using save states. If that's the case... then just ignore this whole post and hope your save states don't get messed.)
Use more than one save slot. In general I'd recommend that you use at least 3. One save slot that you save in whenever a major event occurs such as moving on to a new "chapter" in the game. One to use as your general purpose saving while on the games map. And, the other slot to use for in battle saves. This should give you enough flexibility that you can get around even the most stubborn save freezing.
Save like you have OCD. One of two things is going to happen when you attempt to save your game... it will either work and all is well in the world... or the game will freeze. If you are saving often you have a greater chance of having a more recent save to fall back on. There is no good reason to hold off on saving as it will not in any way lessen the chances of a freeze. In fact it will just cause you to lose more progress... whenever whatever it is that "triggers" the game to freeze on your next attempt occurs it will not go away so don't avoid saving.
Pay attention to your time stamps. So long as your save game is showing a date and time you're likely going to have smooth sailing. If you notice that the date and time is all zeros then you're in for a roller coaster ride of save game freezes.
So... what do you do when you run into a save game freeze?
First, don't panic. Your save game isn't ruined... well the one you were trying to save at the time is gone... but the save slot itself won't be corrupted or anything. You can safely load that slot and play from it although you will have lost any progress since you last successfully saved, which is why you need to be work pre-emptively and save often.
Second, try to find the "trigger" that causes your next save attempt to freeze.
If its something specific like a certain event that after seeing you can't save then try doing things and saving a bunch and coming back to it. Many times you can get past it by doing this. For instance you could sleep in a towns inn, fight a battle, gather information (even if you already saw it before), etc. Sometimes just doing any other activity will allow you to save afterwards and when returning to the event you may be able to then save after it is done.
If you're on the games map and just about anything that you do (sleeping at inns, triggering events, etc...) seems to result in your game freezing afterwards then your best bet is to save a game in battle. Usually after the battle you can save on the map again, though as mentioned above avoid having all your saves be in battle.
In the event that you end up in a really rough patch where your game constantly seems to be freezing when attempting to save the first thing you should do is check if the timestamps are zeroed. If they are then fight a random battle and try saving in battle, then try saving on the map. Keep repeating this process of saving in battle then on the map until your save games start showing an actual date and time. If sleeping at an inn won't let you save after then avoid sleeping at inns and just continue this cycle. Once you see the time and date on the save slots again you should be mostly past that big block of save freezes and it should be moderately safe to continue on with the rest of the game an events.
That's everything I can think of off the top of my head. I hope this helps anyone else who is trying to play.