GameBanshee Forums

Will I lose my saved games?

I tried a minimum install to save some space, but now I've changed my mind and want to do a full install so I'm not swapping discs all the time, but I'm worried about losing my saved games.

TIA

You can make backup copies of your saved games just by copying them to a new directory or burning them to a CD.

If you make a backup, the only thing to worry about if you re-install the game is that mods can cause incompatibilities with your old saved games. In order for old saved games to work correctly (no dialogue errors), you need to make sure you install your mods in exactly the same order. This mainly applies to non-WEIDU mods, but I would be careful with any mod that overwrites or changes your DIALOG.TLK file. (Using Tashia and Solaufein at the same time once caused some problems for me.)

If you want a Full Install, you can save some disk space by consolidating your /DATA and /MOVIE directories. I've written instructions on how to do it before. For example, in this old thread I described how to simulate a Full Installation of BG1 and save hundreds of megabytes of disk space in the process.

The MP saves are in the {BG Directory}\mpsave\ directory and the single player saves are in the {BG Directory}\save\ directory. Just copy them to your desktop (or any temporary location). Reinstalling won't cause any problems if all you do is change the install size.


There are two alternatives to reinstalling, though:

1) Put in an install disk, copy the files to your hard drive. (Any location will work, but I would reccomend your BG2 folder). Open up your BG2 Directory and edit Baldur.ini. Look for the [Alias] section. Here is what mine looks like:

[Alias]
HD0:=C:\Games\BG2\
CD1:=C:\Games\BG2\CD1\
CD2:=C:\Games\BG2\CD2\
CD3:=C:\Games\BG2\CD3\
CD4:=C:\Games\BG2\CD4\
CD5:=C:\Games\BG2\CD5\

For each CD you installed, change the respective CD path to the path that you installed it to. It will still ask you for the SoA (if ToB is not installed) or ToB disk, though. This is basically all doing a full install does.


2) Use virtual drives and edit your [Alias] section accordingly. I don't reccomend doing this for all 5 disks, though.

All of the CDs (except for CD1, I think) have a \DATA directory and a \MOVIES directory. If you do a full install, the installation program creates subdirectories called CD2, CD3, etc., which are essentially copies of each CD. Each of those sudirectories has its own \DATA directory and \MOVIES directory. If you look at the file lists, you might notice that there is a lot of redundancy. Each CD contains files (I guess you could call them "core files") that also appear on the other CDs--this eliminates the need to swap CDs every time the game needs to access a redundant file from a CD. When you have all of the DATA files and MOVIE files on your hard drive, the redundancy serves no useful purpose, and it makes the game take up about half a gig of extra disk space.

So here's what I do. Instead of creating separate directories for each CD, I put all of the DATA files into the main BG2 \DATA directory, and I put all of the MOVIE files into one \MOVIES directory. The relevant section of my BALDUR.INI file looks like this:

[Alias]
HD0:=C:\Games\BG2\
CD1:=C:\Games\BG2\
CD2:=C:\Games\BG2\
CD3:=C:\Games\BG2\
CD4:=C:\Games\BG2\
CD5:=C:\Games\BG2\

C:\Games\BG2\ is a parent directory. The game looks for the \DATA directory and the \MOVIES directory in each CD path, but in this case, all of the files are on the hard drive. I specify a single path for all of the DATA files and all of the MOVIE files.

You don't need three or four copies of the MOVIES.BIF file on your hard drive; the game works well with only one. As long as you specify the correct parent directory, the game will find it. You can save a great deal of hard drive space by eliminating the redundancies.

That's a good idea.

The reason mine is like that is because I did a full install. I haven't had to do a smaller install for BG2 and I asummed it was the same as BG1. The last time I did a small install was in about '99.

Or check this out:

FarStone Technology - Virtual Drive and Data Backup Software