Gamedata.dat question

[Karsten75]

Does deleting a custom map from the list of My Maps also delete or remove the score from gamedata.dat? I'm asking because I've now several times suffered a loss of my gamedata.dat file and I want to creaet a small, backup file that just unlocks the story and bonus missions. But I'm not sure that now deleting all the custom maps will also remove whatever dt from them are contained in dameData.dat.

[knucracker]

I don't believe that it does.  The scores are stored by unique idea separately from the custom maps, so removing a map should not affect the scores.

[Karsten75]

So is there any other way to shrink gamedata.dat file?

[knucracker]

Not manually....
But inspecting the code I see that I only store the last 256 code map entries.  An entry consists of data that contains the score, time, etc.  So when you play your 257th code map, the oldest code map will get purged from the list of local scores.

I did this to probably keep gamedata.dat from growing without bounds.  Makes me wonder if this has anything to do with the strangeness that some people see.  I'm gonna bet you have played more than 256 code maps by now....

[Karsten75]

And if there is a bug when you shift them up, I bet the game simply nukes the file and starts over.... :)


Edit:

I usually delete some games from the custom list, but now I wonder if you add story, bonus and code maps to the count or do you maintain separate counts for all?

My code maps is quite large, since I keep all code maps of a particular type.

I have currently 109 maps in my list of custom maps, but I estimate I've probably played around 800 or more... :)

Does it matter if I don't play them to completion? I guess then there is no time/score

[knucracker]

Ok, I've looked more carefully:
-I only apply the count to _code_ maps.  Story maps and even custom maps don't have the limit applied.  Code maps are stored just a wee bit differently and are in a different table from all other maps, hence the separate limit.

-The limiting code doesn't look like it does anything wrong, and seems to test fine.

-An entry only gets added if you finish the map.