Can not save mission, .miz file corrupted - multiple issues

[coldice]

I have experienced a very strange bug and behaviour with the mission editor, which I have never seen before. I have also searched the forums for similar issues, but couldn't find any matching reports.

In summary, the mission editor had problems saving updates to an existing mission file, as well as writing a new mission file and, in the process, corrupted the existing mission file. Next to having completely lost the .miz mission file, this has caused multiple other issues with the game. A detailed description, log file and the corrupted mission files follow below:

Initial issue
I was editing an existing mission file, nothing too crazy, added a few units and waypoints. The only special thing I added was a custom skin for one aircraft unit. Trying to save the mission file, the editor showed an error message, roughly: "failed to save mission file xxx, can't' open file". I retried a few more times after a short moment, resulting in the same error.
I checked whether there were any programs running that could try to open the file, or any disk issues, but everything seemed fine. I retried saving the mission, and this time, the save succeeded. Being suspicious, I saved the mission into a new file using save as.

I exited the mission editor and started a multiplayer server (the initial edited mission file was already in the playlist as first item). After load, I realized it didn't start the desired mission, but a different one from the playlist. I tried to change the mission from the mp lobby, but couldn't see the mission in the ingame file browser. This is when I realized, there was something wrong with the mission file. I checked the mission folder in explorer to see that both mission files were shown with a size of 1kb.

Editor issue
I left the server and clicked on mission editor in the main menu. Surprisingly, it immediately loaded up the Caucasus map, instead of presenting me the "open or create new" and map selection dialog. Also here, the files were not displayed in the ingame file browser.

I then restarted the game and created the mission from scratch, this time performing multiple saves during the process. No further issues were encountered in the mission editor.

File browser issue
I then went to the create new server view, deleted the old mission from the playlist and wanted to add my new mission. However, this time the file browser didn't show any file at all in my mission folder. After a short heart attack (thinking now the whole folder was corrupted) I checked the fs with explorer again (everything was still there and looking ok). I then deleted the corrupted files from the folder on my disk, closed the view and reopened it and now my missions were showing up again, from here on everything was working fine.

 

Closing
I have not experienced any further issues, neither with DCS not any other files on that disk. I can not assert that there were no outside factors causing any fs errors, but it appeared to me, there was something wrong with DCS internally, especially . At least, saving the mission into a new file, which didn't yield any error message, should have succeeded.

carrier_training_2023.miz carrier_training_2023_b.miz mission-save-error-dcs.log

[Rudel_chw]

1 hour ago, coldice said:

Closing
I have not experienced any further issues, neither with DCS not any other files on that disk. I can not assert that there were no outside factors causing any fs errors, but it appeared to me, there was something wrong with DCS internally, especially . At least, saving the mission into a new file, which didn't yield any error message, should have succeeded.

 

Hi,

Issues like this happened to me too in the past, so I opted to use mklink to have my DCS Missions folder stored on a cloud drive. I have not noticed a performance degradation, since DCS uses the local copies of the mission files, which are on an SSD drive, but I get the peace of mind of having constant backup versions of my missions as I go on editing them, looks like this:

 

 

To me it has been a nice safeguard against this kind of issues.