Possible Title ID problem? NHL 2015 save edit issues

Horizon - Xbox Support
1

Hi guys!

I’m having a problem with NHL 2015 game saves (Roster saves to be exact) that never occurred for me in previous versions of the game. To simply duplicate this problem, I transfer a save from my XBox 360 hard drive to my (properly formatted) USB stick, and load my game saves in Horizon. When I open up the Device Explorer, and select my NHL 2015 roster game save that I would like to edit, I’ve been taking notice of the file sizes

Original File Sizes

1310×772 124 KB

After a simple file extraction, and simple insert new file (overwriting the existing file) without editing, or changing a single thing results in the file size of the game save to change (almost double in size). Again, the file that was inserted\overwritten was not changed at all. I clicked on the “Save, Rehash, and Resign” button, and the file size in the Device Manager changed instantly. This also instantly corrupts the game save on the Xbox.

File Sizes After Extract\Insert

1312×777 128 KB

After messing around with some other game saves (successfully), and switching back to troubleshooting my NHL 2015 problem, something occurred to me with respect to the Title ID fields in the Device Manger. On the game saves that I was successful at editing, the Title ID fields in the Device Manager matched the Title ID fields in the individual game saves. This is NOT the case with NHL 2015.

Title ID of NHL 2015 in Device Manager

556×932 67.7 KB

When opening the game save, the Title ID field is filled completely with zeros.

Title ID of NHL Game Save

Searching & amateur troubleshooting led me to a wonderful screen where I could search for the Title IDs of individual games. I clicked on this button, and did a simple search. Something immediately jumped out at me that could be the 100% cause of my grief, agony, and disgust over not being able to figure out these problems. It could also just be a simple coincidence and I once again go back to the drawing board.

Title ID Database Search

Every previous NHL game that I’ve had no trouble editing have the ® symbol after their corresponding titles. NHL 2015 does not. Is this a fixable database problem with Horizon, or is this a case of EA Sports and the way they did the Game Name and Title ID for this year. They never removed the ® from the game saves.

Name of NHL Game Save with ®

I’m assuming that the Title ID in the Database must correspond to the Game Name in the database for successful extraction\replacement of files. If there is some sort of work-around for this issue that someone could help me out with, I would greatly appreciate it. I don’t know if anything can be done on the Horizon side of this issue, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, and I know there are a lot of knowledgeable people out there that might be able to point me in the right direct.

Sorry if the picture files are slightly large in size. On the bright side, I figured out how to use the spoiler tags in my first post. That would have been a mess. Lol. Thanks in advance, everyone.

2

First let me start out by saying that I am not completely sure why the package gets corrupted when you save it. It may be a bug in our STFS library (a new one will be added in a future version of the program).

You’ve discovered two things that the Xbox 360 does:

  1. Each game save is stored on the hard drive as an XContent package with an embedded STFS file system (which is kind of like a ZIP file). STFS stands for Secure Transacted File System, and the “Transacted” part denotes that writing data to it can be done atomically (meaning the operation either succeeds or fails completely). If the operation fails (e.g. the console loses power), the file system needs to remain in the state it was before the write transaction started. The only way to do this, in the case of overwriting an existing file, is to keep a copy of the original data and write the new data to the end of the file system (resulting in a larger XContent package). That way, if the write fails for any reason, the console still sees all of the old data instead of a possibly-corrupted version containing part-old and part-new data. You can test this by monitoring the file size of a package that the Xbox 360 writes after a few saves. In the case of deleting a file, depending on the state of the file system at the time of writing, new data may be written to the end of the file system instead of overwriting previously-deleted data.

  2. Some games are really stupid. I’m not actually sure if it’s the games or the Xbox 360 system itself that does it, but the title ID in the XContent packages of some games is 0. The device manager shows the correct title ID because of the way the packages are organized on the hard drive: \Content{ProfileID}{TitleID}{TypeID}\file.

The Title ID Finder uses the Xbox marketplace to search for games, and we do not use any of those results in Horizon. Microsoft can change the name of a game on the marketplace at any time. For example, Call of Duty 4 was renamed to Modern Warfare, but XContent packages made by the game still show the title as Call of Duty 4.