Been investigating this. The problem in the two sims in the first post is the same. The sim file thinks there are 496 bots in it, but in fact there are only 495. The program crashes attempting to read in and load a 496th bot when in fact it is reading in a bunch of sim-level properties and trying to shoe horn those into a bot structure. Specifcally, the crash is an attempt to allocate a negative length string. I have no idea what caused this but it's most likely on the save side. The fact that it's the last bot in the file is very suspicious. A reading of the code does not offer an obvious off-by-one problem but that is probably what it is. I'm pretty confident it has nothing to do with saving with or without mutations.
I can resurrect these sims if you like. Let me know.
The third sim is a similar problem although it occurs on bot 1742 out of 1934 bots. It takes forever to load and save due to all the mutation details, but what is there appears to be formatted correctly. I do not know if I can resurrect this sim or not (only the first 1742 bots in any case) but probably I can with some work if it's important. Let me know.
It does not appear that any of the files are truncated. Namely, it appears there is a real problem here somewhere with saving the right number of bots though I have no idea what it is at the moment. The corruption does not appear to be a function of killing the program or Windows rebotting during a save or exit or similar.
I'll continue to investigate. Ideas welcome.
