Missing save files
I can use CC3 just fine, including saving files and later opening them. The problem is that if I try to find those files with windows explorer, they're not listed. They're listed and useable with CC3 but windows can't find them. I'm using windows 7. I've tried Save As with all the file types, and I've tried Show Hidden Files in windows, but windows still can't find any of my save files. Is there some special way of exporting files? I want to save my maps as .jpg or something else, then email them.
Comments
I was plodding away on my very large and complected map when I zoom out and the work area of CC3 shrinks. So, I save the file and restart CC3. CC3 crashes on start up, repeatedly. Since CC3 autoloads your last save, I decided to load different map by clicking on the map file from windows, which proceeded normally. Loading the crashing map from the now functioning cc3 causes a crash. More over, I found several of my maps caused crashes, something new.
Then I realized only a handful of my maps were shown in windows.Those missing included the one I was working on and the Autosave file. Like the above posts, I suspected some vista-rerouting issue, but my user folder does not contain any of these files. I searched manually and with the search utility, which picked up the AUTOSAVE shortcut. Unfortunately the file it shortcutted was missing from the vary place it should have been, in the cc3 folder. Apparently even windows was baffled where the file was, if anywhere.
Loading any of the missing files results in a crash. Oddly enough CC3 will generate a preview image of the missing files.
Normally I would think the files were misplaced, however this all happened while I was editing the files in cc3. They were there before. I used to load cc3 by clicking on the map file in the folder...
Here are some pics of my frustration:
http://i.imgur.com/zpfiK.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/K9HMb.jpg
If the file dialog in CC3 shows you the files, they should be somewhere on your system though, since this dialog only shows you what windows tells CC3 is there. CC3 does not keep an internal file list (With exception of the recent list in the File menu, but that has no bearing on the file dialog contents).
The auto save shortcut is also created by windows (it creates shortcuts for recently used files for ease of access), so I am starting to consider the possibility that something has happened to your user directory in windows if the files are truly gone, but then they should be gone from the file dialog as well, which does make me very uncertain what really happened here.
Since File Open dialogs under windows behaves like normal explorer windows, you can try to copy your file to another location using this dialog. Just select one of the "missing" map files in CC3's map dialog, press ctrl+C to copy it, use the dialog to browse to my documents, then hit ctrl+v to paste the file at the new location. You should now see this file if you use the regular windows explorer to examine that location, and you can try to open it from there.
Steve
When this all happened I had speculated that cc3 might have some sort of terrain feature limit that I exceeded. Being that is not the case here, does it have one anyway?
Windows will hide the files if you just try searching using "Search programs & files" in the start menu due to the way it stores data.
I've had to search like this for several programs to find files that got placed not in the location they normaly would go.
As was suggested by several people make a seperate folder not in the CC3 directory to store your maps.
c:\Profantasy\CC3\Crestar etc.