Apparently my overall settings .cfg file gets corrupted occasionally, at some point before or during crash of 010 Editor, such that when I restart 010 Editor, and repeat what I was doing when it crashed, it will crash again.
Also, today while I was having problems with 010 crashing, I exported my settings.
After the next crash, I tried to import that .cfg file, but 010 told me that the file couldn’t be imported.
So here are a few thoughts on how to improve the user experience when there are problematic cfg files:
Use a filename “tag” of some kind, like an incrementing field, to indicate earlier cfg files. This would make it easy to go back to a valid, earlier export of the settings.
Tell the user why a requested .cfg file can’t be imported, for example: “File is incomplete”, “Setting ‘x’ is corrupt”; or if it’s failing something like XML parsing, show the item that failed.
Document the format of the .cfg file.
Validate the .cfg file before writing it. (If it contains XML, there might be an easy, safe way to test its validity? I don’t know very much about XML though.)
And of course, you may be able to think of better ways to deal with corrupt cfg files
Our cfg files are in binary format and we have had reports of corrupted files but that appears to be rare. In the future we are going to be making changes to better detect if there are problems with the cfg file. If you have a cfg file that is corrupted you can send that to us by email and that might give us some clues on how the corruption happened.
If you are getting a reproducible corruption please let us as that is something we’d like to get fixed up right away.
You can always use the ‘Import…’ and ‘Export…’ buttons on the General page of the Options dialog to save or load your cfg file. When exporting you can choose your own file name and include a date or version number if you want.
Another note is that we store our cfg files in windows in the directory:
In this directory the cfg files have version numbers included, e.g. 010editor150.cfg, 010editor140.cfg, etc. If you get a corruption in 150 you can delete or rename this file and then 010 Editor will automatically load settings from the 140 file on startup. Let us know if you have any questions on this.