SR4 Game save sync between Windows and Linux not working

[danizmax]

I asume the game does save the saves into the steam cloud since I can see game saves up to about 13% completion. All saves that were created later (I'm about at 33% in windows version now) are not visible in Linux. Is there anything causing these issues that I don't know about (like windows oinly DLCs)?

[[V] IdolNinja]

With the Workshop support patch, the save file format is now very different between the platforms. Once we work out the remaining bugs from the patch, we will look at updating the Linux version with Workshop support as well. Until then, both coop and saves are not compatible between the two.

[danizmax]

Thanks for the info!

[RayneYoruka]

I have this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ problem...

[zpangwin]

Originally posted by ☆Yoruka☆ よるか:

I have this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ problem...

same here.

for devs:
- Windows 7 to Linux Mint 18.2 (and soon to be 18.3)

[half-second mal]

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER...
No warning. Go ahead and play half a day on windows, then spend two hours trying to figure out why the fsck your saves aren't showing up on linux, only to discover this BS.
I expect games to work *better* after a few years.

[danizmax]

This game is old, people don't pay or dont't pay much for old games, and stakeholders want money. You can see where this is going. THB I didn't have much faith into reply of OP.

[zpangwin]

//start programmer rant
yeah. would be nice if idk... maybe they'd at least release the save file specs so someone could write an open source conversion utility without having to reverse engineer 2 different save file formats and hope that it works (I mean even the vanilla game is buggy af... would hate to have to worry about bugs related to save-file formatting on top of it). If they did, maybe I would take a stab at it... but not going to reverse engineer anything for legal (and laziness) reasons.

EDIT:
nmv... guess it is a versioning difference between platforms. still if the specs were made open, I'd at least be willing to take a look.

//end programmer rant

Edit2: In the unlikely event devs are still going to do anything about this, I'll likely be on the latest Linux Mint (about to switch to v19) or if for some strange reason Clem were to stop developing Mint, I'd likely go back to Ubuntu.

[Quantum]

Originally posted by zpangwin:

//start programmer rant
yeah. would be nice if idk... maybe they'd at least release the save file specs so someone could write an open source conversion utility without having to reverse engineer 2 different save file formats and hope that it works (I mean even the vanilla game is buggy af... would hate to have to worry about bugs related to save-file formatting on top of it). If they did, maybe I would take a stab at it... but not going to reverse engineer anything for legal (and laziness) reasons.

EDIT:
nmv... guess it is a versioning difference between platforms. still if the specs were made open, I'd at least be willing to take a look.

//end programmer rant

Here's a start:
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/sr-tt-save-game-schema.2577/
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/save-file-names.14768/
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/sr3-save-editor-c.1042/

The full source code to the sr3 save file editor is included in that last link.
Unfortunately, most of that information does not apply to the new SR4 save format (Windows), but the basic content must be the same. Maybe it's not so hard to reverse engineer that.

If you want to take a stab at writing a converter, I'm sure a LOT of people would be eternally grateful. :)

[zpangwin]

Originally posted by Quantum:

...

Here's a start:
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/sr-tt-save-game-schema.2577/
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/save-file-names.14768/
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/sr3-save-editor-c.1042/

The full source code to the sr3 save file editor is included in that last link.
Unfortunately, most of that information does not apply to the new SR4 save format (Windows), but the basic content must be the same. Maybe it's not so hard to reverse engineer that.

If you want to take a stab at writing a converter, I'm sure a LOT of people would be eternally grateful. :)

Unfortunately, that all looks to be for Saints Row the Third format otherwise that would be very close to what I would need (even on page 2 of the first link they say how they want the same thing for SRIV). Even though file sizes are similar and it is by same devs, format would be different for different games I think; if you glance through on some of the fields, it looks like it basically saves values for all the different stats for SRTT; SRIV would have different stats, and probably be in a different order.

Not trying to get folks hopes up here... I'm not much into reverse engineering bc it is EXTREMELY time consuming and frankly it's not something I'm all skilled at to start with. That gives me a very rough idea of how many data points are likely tracked for SRIV, if not their order or types. I'm not too inclined to spend the time trying to figure out what the save file format is by trial and error - especially not for 2 different versions with such a large number of values. Like I said before, If they release the spec I might take a stab.

What really sucks for me is that while looking through those threads I saw that Gat Out of Hell has something where it reads in SRIV saves using the old format... that combined with the fact that they would have had to convert "old format" to new format" at some point probably means that they have all the conversion code already written (though probably only for converting in 1 direction). Realizing how little effort this would be for them to do makes even worse that it likely has been abandoned.

[Vortex Acherontic]

Whats the status here? A year has pased since then and I can not play with any windows user.

[zpangwin]

As far as I am aware, this objective has been enitely abandoned by the devs and nobody from the community has reverse-engineered the save structure for SR4 (either the old format or the new format), which to be fair, is a very grueling time-consuming process that is very much trial and error... as stated above, i won't bother with the reverse engineering but if someone else does that part then i might try and find some time to throw together a conversion utility.

In other words, no status change... all of us that want to use Linux are considered "not worth it" by the dev studio/publisher. and with that attitude, it is hard for me personally to justify buying future games from them.

Only other thing I can think of would to be googling to see if anyone has had luck installing under Wine/PlayOnLinux and cross your fingers.

[half-second mal]

It would be neat if steam let us use proton to run the windows version of a game with a second-rate linux port

[Vortex Acherontic]

It's a feature request already submited to valve, take a look here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5638

[danizmax]

A small joke... they should just open-source the game, I think its only fitting for such a crazy game ;P