In my case the error was caused by the saved game file having an extended character, specifically
....
changed each "…" into "!" and it loaded OK, like this
Hallo SandJ,
thanks for publishing a problem with solution
I just tried to replicate the problem on the mac by editing a saved game. It seems that "…" is a perfect legal character in plists that does not need an escape sequence. In my case the file loaded okay and I saw the "…" symbol in the comms message after launch.
But my test was for the Mac. Linux or windows could handle the character different.
SandJ, are you running Oolite on Linux? The messages referring to non-existing ships, when these ships are part of the core package, are characteristic of the GNUstep 1.19.3 bug present in the version of GNUstep distributed with the latest Ubunbu releases. I can confirm that the … character does not generate problems with savegames and other plist types on Windows either.
Yes; I would have been running either Ubuntu 9.x or 10.4
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