Career went *poof*

[Moosemedford]

Okay... so this is kind of a bummer. I've had the game for a few days, been playing a bit. Had spent enough time on the dirt tracks to start my own team, got noticed, did same thing with trucks. After a lot of work, finally got a shot at the next series (the xfinity series). I'm going through the "setup new season" menu with my "agent" when I get a BSOD (the Windows 10 version with the sad face - I think one of my RAM sticks is going bad, been getting intermitent BSOD lately).

I restart the computer, relaunch the game. And there is NO "resume my career". Instead, it's a "Start My Career". It appears the game is completely reset. Options which I had setup (driving options, music volume, etc.) are all reset to default values. And the career I'd spent hours on - can't find it.

What the everliving eff??? I get it - my system crashed. But the game should still have a fairly recent save. I've had the game crash several times and each time have come back to the race menu - sure I lost whatever I was doing in that particular race, but not a tremendous amount of time lost. But in this case, it's definitely hours lost.

[Vlad Tepes]

I've never seen anything like this. I agree that you should have been brought back to (at least) the previous race, but you should not have lost your career.
Sorry, wish I could help. It would be nice if they had some type of manual save, that you could export your situation to some other location or drive.. and restore it later..
Sounds like whatever crashed really confused the game.
In this case I would certainly try to open a support ticket and see if they can't help you.

[Murph]

steam was down today, if you were doing any of this progress during then, it most likely did not sync with the steam cloud, thus losing your data. at least that's my guess, don't know what else it may be :(

[Moosemedford]

@ voltaj - appreciate the sympathy. I did find the saves directory (was mentioned on another thread - is (C:\Users\user_name\NASCAR Heat 4\SaveData). Apparently the act of launching the game itself (at launch it started with the "welcome new player to Nascar Heat 4, let's start a new profile for you) was enough to generate new files. I'm guessing the old ones somehow became corrupt, and when the game re-launched and couldn't read them, it just defaulted to new??

@ Agent 86 - didn't realize Steam was down. But this was actually something I've worked on for a bit of time. I've only had the game about 4 days, and already have 36 hours played. Guess I probably like it a bit (when it doesn't *poof* my progress).

To be honest this is one of the few games I can remember playing in recent memory that doesn't have save slots and a manual save capability. Simply saves on exit. In my opinion this is a design problem.

For myself, now that I know where the files are saved, I can manually back them up. It's a pain but at least in theory if my game goes completely sideways again at least I won't be starting from scratch.

[Patfox74]

Originally posted by Agent 86:

steam was down today, if you were doing any of this progress during then, it most likely did not sync with the steam cloud, thus losing your data. at least that's my guess, don't know what else it may be :(

Man, i believe that like previous versions of 704 games, profile hasnt sync with ou Steam account. I used to backup my save on Onedrive. In my computer with W10 the path is C:\Users\"my user"\NASCAR Heat 4

Even my game installed at drive D:

[Kumquat]

The game saves pretty frequently (any time you do something that would require a save). You can tell it's saving when a little spinning circle shows up in the lower right corner. It sounds like whatever happened to your system may have corrupted the save file. Maybe it crashed at the exact moment it was writing the save file?

[Moosemedford]

@ Kumquat - I'm thinking that you are correct. The BSOD occurred exactly while my "agent" was "setting up" my new season. I'm sure that the game was probably in process of saving when the BSOD happened and as a result the files were corrupted.

I still think this reflects of poor game design. On two levels.

First, the lack of save slots is really almost a "are you kidding me" move by 704. Seriously, can anyone name me a major game which has a stand-alone career mode yet doesn't have save slots? I can't think of one. Maybe I'm being overly critical here but that truly baffles me.

Secondly, if you are going to force players to "put all their eggs in one basket" by having only one save for career mode, which auto-saves frequently during game play then there are ways to architect the save routine so that you minimize risk of data corruption. For instance, generate the new save file in a cache/temporary location, then copy (not move, but COPY) the new file from the cache location to the save directory, then perform a checksum on the two files and once, and only once, the checksum indicates the two files are the same, then delete the one in the cache location.

From my perspective, the fact that my data all went *poof* is ample evidence that 704 did a horrible job of writing the save code. And the fact that I've had to write a script which copies the files from the "C:\Users\user_name\NASCAR Heat 4\SaveData" directory to another directory on another drive on my computer, and then have task scheduler set to run that script in the background

[Moosemedford]

Well, it happened again.

At approximately 5:00 PM I completed a race. Went through the various little movie files of "congrats on your win" and/or "why did you run me into the wall?". Replied to each of those appropriately, went to the next race, and began doing the "assign tasks". *bam* BSOD at 5:02 PM (according to Windows event log).

Upon restart, I notice that the files in the directory C:\Users\user_name\NASCAR Heat 4\SaveData have a time stamp of 5:01 PM - which was immediately before the BSOD. I believe this time likely corresponds with when I had completed my last game and was being congratulated for my victory. So I'm thinking "great, hopefully no lost progress". I back those files up *before* I launch the game. The largest of those files is a savedata file which is 2175 KB.

I launch the game. I get the "Welcome" screen and get asked to setup my profile. At this point, other than do a Task Manager and End Task, there's nothing I can do other than complete the setup wizard. Pick a controller, pick a difficulty level, choose an "anthem". Then I get to the main menu and instead of resume my career, the option is to "Start My Career".

I exit the game. Browse back to C:\Users\user_name\NASCAR Heat 4\SaveData and find the same four file names, but all modified 5:17 PM (the time I exited the game). They are also considerably smaller than what was there before.

I know that there developers read these forums and occasionally reply. Hopefully they see this. From my perspective, this is an absolutely game-breaking bug. I'm not saying that the game is causing the BSOD, though that's an interesting possibility. But regardless of the root cause of the BSOD, the game should not so easily corrupt. I now have 55 hours game play in, when this happened the first time I had 36 hours. So another 19 hours of working on my little virtual racing career is down the tube.

If by chance you are browsing this forum considering purchasing this game, I urge you not to until they get this fixed. I'll gladly change my recommendation pending a fix.

[Kumquat]

Did you copy your backups of the saves back into the SaveData directory and it still didn't work? Do you make sure to backup all files in that directory? That should definitely work as a backup strategy.

[Kumquat]

And I wouldn't be so certain that anyone is monitoring these forums. These are community forums, not an official support channel. If you want to make sure they know about this, best to open a support ticket with 704 Games.

[Moosemedford]

@ Kumquat - thanks for your feedback man. Yes, I backed up the entire directory.

And I am assuming that these forums are not monitored (although I did see a Dev comment on an earlier thread) and I have opened up a support ticket with 704, which included a zip file of my backed up SaveData directory. After waiting 24 hours, I got a nice boiler-plate response asking that I (a) verify that my game and all Steam drivers are updated, (b) uninstall and reinstall the game, and (c) verify the integrity of my Steam installation....

I'm kind of surprised they didn't ask me to run a chkdsk, defrag, and to uninstall antivirus applications. Although my best guess is that's the script for "level 2" support...

[Vlad Tepes]

They were monitoring the forums a few weeks ago, someone had an issue, and they acknowledged it, then later posted a patch. I'm not sure how often they do.
I agree that this is deal breaker. I've been lucky so far, but haven't played that much, and purposely restarted my career a few times as I learned things.. So maybe my time will come lol.. I can tell you that after reading your posts, if it happens to me even once, I will probably go back to NR2003...
Anyway, I really hope you get your problem solved and I hope they follow through with your ticket. Maybe they will have an answer eventually.

[madman85368]

I've had my career RESET twice now and I was almost in the the monster energy series

[Vlad Tepes]

Wow, I'm starting to get worried. Do they have a main support forum at their website? I'm guessing this is a PC only thing, and they probably won't put priority on it.

[Moosemedford]

@madman: when your career reset, do you recall if at startup you received the “welcome new user” (you pick your controller, your difficulty, and anthem)??? Because if you did, then it very much sounds like what happened with me - complete corruption of the save file.

@voltaj: they do not have any support forum which I found. You can email support to begin a ticket. Don’t expect spectacular results. So far with mine the net result is “we don’t know what happened, but not everyone is seeing this so it must be your system”... in the meantime, I’ve taken it upon myself to make copies of the save directory. It’s kinda silly to have to do that, but at least I have some confidence that if it happens again I won’t lose my entire career.

[madman85368]

Originally posted by Moosealbany:

@madman: when your career reset, do you recall if at startup you received the “welcome new user” (you pick your controller, your difficulty, and anthem)??? Because if you did, then it very much sounds like what happened with me - complete corruption of the save file.

@voltaj: they do not have any support forum which I found. You can email support to begin a ticket. Don’t expect spectacular results. So far with mine the net result is “we don’t know what happened, but not everyone is seeing this so it must be your system”... in the meantime, I’ve taken it upon myself to make copies of the save directory. It’s kinda silly to have to do that, but at least I have some confidence that if it happens again I won’t lose my entire career.

Yes I did both times it's done it