Fix for Save /Load Game Issues. 2K made aware of this post.

[Goda]

If you started to play the game, went to the main menu and found that you did not save anything, then you have a problem. It consists in the fact that in the path to the location of the Documents folder you have Cyrillic or some other characters (not Latin). The problem is in mafia 2 since 2010. But in the normal version, the saving is stored in the Appdata folder, and in the new one in the "Documents" folder.

Now I will help you solve this problem in one of the ways I know:
1) Create a folder in the C: \ directory and name it "Documents"
2) Next we find your “Documents” folder (Usually it is stored C: \ users \ your user \), but sometimes in the Onedrive folder
3) Right-click on the "Documents" folder, select properties, then click on "Location", then on "Move", and select the path to the previously created folder "Documents", click accept, agree with the warning, click ok. Documents folder will be in new location and will still work as normal.


4) Next, wait until the files move. After our new Documents folder in C: \ the documents icon should appear, and the folder itself will be renamed to “Documents”. Although the folder name has not changed, the path now does not contain Cyrillic and other characters!
_______________________________________________________________________________

P.S If you get an error that you cannot move, since there is another folder that cannot be redirected, do the following:
To solve this problem, right-click on the OneDrive icon in the tray, select "options", then select "backup management" in the "backup" tab and re-enable it (if it was turned off before), wait for the folder to synchronize . After these manipulations, turn off synchronization in the same way, and voila! Now you can safely change the location of the system folders. This method works for the folders "documents", "desktop" and "image". To speed up the synchronization process, you can transfer files from the problem folder to any other folder for a while, after waiting for synchronization, change the location, and drop the necessary files to a new location.
(The solution to this problem belongs to user Cortes)

[V I D A L]

Who is gonna stick it though? Not a single dev comes here.

[Goda]

Originally posted by V I D A L:

Who is gonna stick it though? Not a single dev comes here.

bump i guess. also steam moderators

[Goda]

Bump

[Silent]

This should be brought to the dev team's attention. They are already using Unicode-based functions to manipulate paths to save directories, so assuming what you're saying is true (I don't doubt it in the slightest), it is character conversion failure on their end. Should be an easy fix, which should also be considered urgent.

[Silent]

I spent some time debugging this and figured out the reason behind this breakage - the game uses a wrong function to convert characters from UTF-16 to ANSI/UTF-8 and it "skips" characters it can't recognize. At a result, it possibly tries to write to a directory it has no write access to (presumably C:\Users):
https://twitter.com/__silent_/status/1263540672738594821

It's trivially fixable, both unofficially and by the developers themselves! I'm going to give it a spin myself.

[Goda]

Originally posted by Silent:

I spent some time debugging this and figured out the reason behind this breakage - the game uses a wrong function to convert characters from UTF-16 to ANSI/UTF-8 and it "skips" characters it can't recognize. At a result, it possibly tries to write to a directory it has no write access to (presumably C:\Users):
https://twitter.com/__silent_/status/1263540672738594821

It's trivially fixable, both unofficially and by the developers themselves! I'm going to give it a spin myself.

i dont even know how they missed this

[sithappens]

running game as administrator solved the problem for me

(directly from game . exe, not the launcher)

[Silent]

Originally posted by sithappens:

running game as administrator solved the problem for me

(directly from game . exe, not the launcher)

It's a very bad solution - your saves will effectively now be located in C:\Users\My Games. You generally don't want to do that.

I figured out the fix for those issues ATM and I have a working proof of concept - notice how the path is full of non-ASCII characters, including Cyrillic, yet the game is now able to save there with no issues:
https://twitter.com/__silent_/status/1263584422839808000

I'm not sure if it makes sense to release though this, since an official fix should (hopefully) arrive soon. I'll make sure to try and get the message through to the dev team if possible, though.

[Cotres]

Please indicate where you got this solution to the problem.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2103023421

[sithappens]

Originally posted by Silent:

Originally posted by sithappens:

running game as administrator solved the problem for me

(directly from game . exe, not the launcher)

It's a very bad solution - your saves will effectively now be located in C:\Users\My Games. You generally don't want to do that.

I figured out the fix for those issues ATM and I have a working proof of concept - notice how the path is full of non-ASCII characters, including Cyrillic, yet the game is now able to save there with no issues:
https://twitter.com/__silent_/status/1263584422839808000

I'm not sure if it makes sense to release though this, since an official fix should (hopefully) arrive soon. I'll make sure to try and get the message through to the dev team if possible, though.

I didn't change to path to save folder. Just make sure default save folder isn't read only and run the game as administrator. It worked for me without changing the path.

[Goda]

Originally posted by Cotres:

Please indicate where you got this solution to the problem.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2103023421

What are you talking about? It clearly states it at the end.

[Goda]

Originally posted by sithappens:

Originally posted by Silent:

It's a very bad solution - your saves will effectively now be located in C:\Users\My Games. You generally don't want to do that.

I figured out the fix for those issues ATM and I have a working proof of concept - notice how the path is full of non-ASCII characters, including Cyrillic, yet the game is now able to save there with no issues:
https://twitter.com/__silent_/status/1263584422839808000

I'm not sure if it makes sense to release though this, since an official fix should (hopefully) arrive soon. I'll make sure to try and get the message through to the dev team if possible, though.

I didn't change to path to save folder. Just make sure default save folder isn't read only and run the game as administrator. It worked for me without changing the path.

But you end up having to run as administrator every time when this simple fix eliminates that whole thing.

[Silent]

Originally posted by sithappens:

I didn't change to path to save folder. Just make sure default save folder isn't read only and run the game as administrator. It worked for me without changing the path.

I can see a few issues with that approach:

• As said previously, you need to run the game as admin every time or else the game might not have access to these files.
  
• I don't know what are the implications of creating a new directory directly in the Users directory, which is essentially what your solution does. I imagine some software may be confused by that "My Games" user the game creates.
  
• When/if this gets fixed either by my patch or the official patch, you won't see those saves. You'll need to remember to move them to the new, correct location.

[sithappens]

Originally posted by Silent:

Originally posted by sithappens:

I didn't change to path to save folder. Just make sure default save folder isn't read only and run the game as administrator. It worked for me without changing the path.

I can see a few issues with that approach:

• As said previously, you need to run the game as admin every time or else the game might not have access to these files.
  
• I don't know what are the implications of creating a new directory directly in the Users directory, which is essentially what your solution does. I imagine some software may be confused by that "My Games" user the game creates.
  
• When/if this gets fixed either by my patch or the official patch, you won't see those saves. You'll need to remember to move them to the new, correct location.

I said I didn't change any folders or paths. Just checked the "run as administrator" in compatibility tab and everything is fine. No need to move anything when/if patch arrives.

[Silent]

Originally posted by sithappens:

I said I didn't change any folders or paths. Just checked the "run as administrator" in compatibility tab and everything is fine. No need to move anything when/if patch arrives.

Look, I know - and I know what the game does then. Check your Users directory for yourself and you'll find your saves there, in My Games directory. Once the patch hit, you will have to move those files.