Can you expand on what those "ghost parties" are and what are their party templates?
I don't seem to be able to open any corrupted savegame with any of the two available savegame editor thingies,
they are buggy and their error handling is beyond terrible. Sigh. *whiny whiny*
Sorry for the delay on answering. The tool I use is:
http://www.moddb.com/games/mount-blade-warband/downloads/mount-blade-savegame-editor-converter
It's misleading because the author planned it as a conversion tool but thanks to its methodology created a powerfull and configurable tool. I just point it to TLD module directory and to the savegame in question and I got it loaded without problems. You can access the Dunlending Camp coordinates and effectively check how it spawns in the wrong ones on the corrupted savegame but, alas, as the coverter lacks the adequate structure definition to parse TLD savegame additions, it can't generate a correct full TLD savegame.
Sadly my friend deleted his corrupted savegame so I speak of memory when refering to the corrupted data on the following paragraph, k?:
- On the structure you see all individual parties under "party records" node.
* On my different savegames I have a more or less constant ammount of 1k records (They span around 900 days of the same campaign). On my friend's healthy savegames figures are more or less the same (We both use 850 default TLD party limit). By "Ghost Parties" I refer precissely to parties that have no template assigned (They appear as blank entries). 2 types: With valid = 1 and extra info and valid = 0 containing just 3 data values. This Ghosts appear also on healthy savegames, but are a few only.
* On his corrupted savegame the total number of party records was 8000!!... And most were "Ghost" ie templateless parties.
I think it may be related to some engine bug, depending on how the party is terminated some seems to linger into the system and end triggering some overflow on some index or something like that.
If I had to start somewhere, I would look on how TLD enforces its party limit... Maybe the "killing" process is not completely clean and due to the massive spamming of the trapped Dunlending Camp is amplyfing this bug... Just crazy speculation, ofc.
EDIT: When I refer to the "corrupted savegame" I mean a savegame that after a few moments after
finished loading made MB CTD... Not a "real" corrupted savegame the game can't load.