A word of advice - saving conflicts with memory access

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

Hello Community,

A word of advice which some people may find useful. Recently I have accidentally nuked two of my cities due to, what seems to be, a memory access conflict between SC4 and other applications. Here is how it transpired...

I played one of the cities for some time and then clicked the "save" button. However, when doing so, I have also accidentally clicked on Blender's taskbar icon, launching this program all while SC4 was still saving. As a result, SC4 stuttered for a good while and eventually "saved" the city - totally erasing it. The same happened an hour ago when I took a screenshot and started saving the city then,  without much thought, immediately proceeded with opening GIMP to paste the screenshot in. Result - saving city erased.

It seems that for some reason SC4 is "jealous" about memory access and any time other application tries to access the memory while a city is being saved, the game simply gives up and borks the save file out of spite. 

Luckily, I do have a repository of backups so I was able to just import the previous version of both cities and restored them without further problems. And I'm lucky I did that. Because once a city tile gets corrupted this way, you won't even be able to restore it through Explorer copy-paste. It has to be imported in-game from one of your backups.

Hope some find it useful. I'll stick around, and will be happy to provide further details if anyone is interested.

[rsc204 21,808]

It's long been known that switching focus whilst saving can be catastrophic for SC4 Save files. I guess you need to be especially careful if you are playing in Windowed mode, since anything in the taskbar is easily clicked. I use CTRL+S to save my game, provided you don't do anything until the confirmation box appears, it's pretty fool proof.