Save game files

[DeadByLag]

Any veteran gamer will quickly know that while this game does not require saving, it certainly demands so just about every single time we have to speak with anybody. I have already been re-tracing steps, undoing and redoing hours' worth of work. Having those granular level points of time saved have helped alleviate some of the frustration.

But then, consequently the game's Load screen takes longer and longer to load the entire list of saves. Apparently the UI isn't designed with scalability in mind to handle several hundred saves. I have been deleting some here and there but with 342 now only at the beginning of chapter 3 it gets annoyingly slow. Also can't use keyboard Page up/down, scrolling by mouse arrows take too many clicks, scrolling by the bar zooms by too fast.

Deleting the old saves is a touchy issue since this game has such convoluted story-quest inter-dependencies; it is difficult new players to know what/where are the critical junction points to safe keep. What have veteran players done to manage this?

[max.strauss]

Originally posted by riotangel:

Any veteran gamer will quickly know that while this game does not require saving, it certainly demands so...

Yes, so true. And (almost) any veteran player knows that there are some useful devices to store old saves (USB-sticks, external harddisks, a simple folder "old saves" will do the job.)

So every time this happens...

Originally posted by riotangel:

...the game's Load screen takes longer and longer to load the entire list of saves.

...I copy most saves to another folder. Isn't it genial? Should I mention that I delete the redundant saves afterwards?

[DeadByLag]

I wasn't sure if the game purely worked on individual save files in the folder, or had some other registry data held elsewhere. So only relied on the game UI to delete files. But what I did was to move files into sub-folders by chapters and the game didn't crash so looks safe. Thanks.

Although it's still going to be annoying to move save files to and fro just to figure out which stage within a chapter they were. The file names unfortunately don't carry enough granular detail.

[DeadByLag]

WARNING

So I have been coming across and reading some complaints from fellow gamers regarding corrupted save files (ALL of them). Seemingly, while the game per se uses a raw file-based architecture, the inclusion of Steam Cloud can confound the issue which actually relies on in-game saves and deletes to sync to their cloud storage. If the cloud storage capacity is exceeded, this can somehow mess up the local save game files.

I cannot really confirm this myself since I have disabled Steam Cloud (really only play on a dedicated computer), but a hyuge, bigly PSA warning for other players.

[JP_Russell]

I usually just let the saves pile up until I get to a new act, then I delete all the saves from two acts ago. So in other words, I don't touch the saves until act 3, where I delete all the saves from act 1, and in act 4 I delete all from 2, etc.

I rarely actually have to access the save menu as I'm almost always using quicksave and quickload, and the longer load time on the menu doesn't get too bad as long as I delete saves this way. Also keeps my save folder from getting to like 5+ GB. I'd probably rack up around 10GB of saves by the end of the game if I never deleted anything.

[DeadByLag]

Originally posted by JP_Russell:

I usually just let the saves pile up until I get to a new act, then I delete all the saves from two acts ago. So in other words, I don't touch the saves until act 3, where I delete all the saves from act 1, and in act 4 I delete all from 2, etc.

I rarely actually have to access the save menu as I'm almost always using quicksave and quickload, and the longer load time on the menu doesn't get too bad as long as I delete saves this way. Also keeps my save folder from getting to like 5+ GB. I'd probably rack up around 10GB of saves by the end of the game if I never deleted anything.

Thing is within a single chapter alone one can unconsciously accumulate hundreds of saves, saving before talking to any char, transitioning zone, every gang of mobs in the vicinity defeated, every landmark successfully traversed, etc. It's so easy to get paranoid over breaking a quest at the slightest move.

I don't play many RPGs but this easily takes top spot for most fragile quest system with all the convoluted inter-quest phase dependencies. One wrong move and it's oops I gotta re-do the entire sequence in another order now.

The segmentation of saves by chapter sub-folders helps a lot. But as indicated in my last post, I am unsure of the state of Steam Cloud with regards to this game. I barely pay attention to that service and wonder how to see what exactly is in my own cloud stage "drive".

[DeadByLag]

Originally posted by riotangel:

If the cloud storage capacity is exceeded, this can somehow mess up the local save game files.

On learning up more about Steam Cloud, it appears I jolly well may have saved myself from disaster when I disabled it previously. I was this close to exceeding the storage limit per game.

http://imgur.com/a/9R2uO

Now to figure out how to manually "clean house".

[DeadByLag]

Ok so practically spent most of the evening learning what Steam Cloud really is trying to do, and have been experimenting to see what I can do about the bloated storage in the Steam server(s).

So The Witcher Enhanced Edition application ID registered with Steam is 20900. The Steam Cloud settings for the app/game can then be found at

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\<USER ID>\20900

or wherever different drive and path one might have installed the Steam client at.

In there is a single file remotecache.vdf with contents somewhat resembling JSON format (example below)

"20900"
{
	"The Witcher/saves/000007 - Kaer Morhen - exterior-000.TheWitcherSave"
	{
		"root"		"2"
		"size"		"0"
		"localtime"		"0"
		"time"		"0"
		"remotetime"		"1498893776"
		"sha"		"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
		"syncstate"		"1"
		"persiststate"		"2"
		"platformstosync2"		"1"
	}
	"The Witcher/saves/000008 - Kaer Morhen - exterior-001.TheWitcherSave"
	{
		"root"		"2"
		"size"		"0"
		"localtime"		"0"
		"time"		"0"
		"remotetime"		"1498893914"
		"sha"		"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
		"syncstate"		"1"
		"persiststate"		"2"
		"platformstosync2"		"1"
	}
	"The Witcher/saves/000009 - Kaer Morhen - exterior-002.TheWitcherSave"
	{
		"root"		"2"
		"size"		"0"
		"localtime"		"0"
		"time"		"0"
		"remotetime"		"1498895016"
		"sha"		"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
		"syncstate"		"1"
		"persiststate"		"2"
		"platformstosync2"		"1"
	}
	"The Witcher/saves/000003 - Kaer Morhen - exterior (autosave)-005.TheWitcherSave"
	{
		"root"		"2"
		"size"		"0"
		"localtime"		"0"
		"time"		"0"
		"remotetime"		"1498931539"
		"sha"		"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
		"syncstate"		"1"
		"persiststate"		"2"
		"platformstosync2"		"1"
	}
	"The Witcher/saves/000003 - The Outskirts of Vizima (autosave)-032.TheWitcherSave"
	{
		"root"		"2"
		"size"		"0"
		"localtime"		"0"
		"time"		"0"
		"remotetime"		"1499109665"
		"sha"		"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
		"syncstate"		"1"
		"persiststate"		"2"
		"platformstosync2"		"1"
	}
}

For many people like me, this list is gonna contain hundreds upon hundreds of entries; each node representing a save file that has been uploaded to cloud storage. If I delete the remotecache.vdf file, a new one will be re-created based on the files in remote storage.

It appears to rely entirely on the game's bulit-in save/delete functions to add or remove files from this list; thus syncing with cloud storage. When Steam Cloud is disabled, either globally or specifically for this game, the save file list will go out of sync. All those old save files I manually deleted/moved in Windows Explorer seemingly still exists in cloud storage, and I do not know how to clean up the remote side manually (since there is no Steam Cloud UI tool for a casual player to see what's stored there and perform housekeeping).

Some games if designed properly right from the start with Steam Cloud in mind, seem to be able to make the additional step of performing a differential check between remote cloud and local drive, and prompting the user to sync.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6736-QEIG-8941#conflicts

Or is that done by Steam rather than the game?

Well at least for The Witcher EE there is no such prompt despite the evidently mismatch in save file content. To clean up the cloud side, it seems like gonna need a very tedious batch of work to re-create each missing save file name only to have the game perform the delete so that the cloud copy vaporises too.

This is way too much work demanded from regular gamers.

I have alternatively been spending hours trying to compile and getting a custom project tool SteamCloudFileManager and get it running without error.

https://github.com/GMMan/SteamCloudFileManagerLite

After finally compiling a stable version though, the tool does not list any file entries for appID 20900, despite being able to tell storage consumed vs quote limit. Still trying to figure this out.

[JP_Russell]

I've played this game enough times that I've kind of internalized where the problem areas are that can lead to quests resolving in ways I didn't want, and roughly what order to do things in to avoid issues.

I always disable cloud saving features. All cloud systems are technically vulnerable to these problems, and it only takes one tiny programming mistake for users to lose everything unexpectedly. They're never worth it to me.

[DeadByLag]

Originally posted by JP_Russell:

I always disable cloud saving features. All cloud systems are technically vulnerable to these problems, and it only takes one tiny programming mistake for users to lose everything unexpectedly. They're never worth it to me.

Yea plenty of times developers introduce a feature thinking it's a good idea, without any foresight to consider the long-term implications and consequences, and failing to realise the time bombs they are planting into system.

Throughout my career as a enterprise systems software developer, I have had the pleasure displeasure of personally fixing and "defusing" such time bombs left behind by previous colleagues. It is incredible to witness how little they thing of capacity, stability, and scalability in the long run; how satisfied they seem to get just because the developed product can handle a very light simple scenario. Like throwing a paper aeroplane into a thunderstorm.

Thing is I didn't even bother to learn about Steam Cloud and its finer details, until I came across those horror reports. Only then did I realise The WItcher EE makes (dangerous) use of that feature and disabled it. But think of the many more thousands of casual gamers who wouldn't be paying attention to such hidden details - after all we just want to log in and play games, not play software disaster detective and forensics - and having the game blow up in their faces much later.

[DeadByLag]

Last night I completed the game, thankfully, without any corruption incident to save files. (I had be continually backing them up to separate folders nonetheless).

I had deliberately left Steam Cloud enabled to observe what would happen if the storage quote got exceeded. While I am still very ignorant and confused how the synchronisation logic works, I saw that remotecache.vdf update itself with my incremental new saves, but the very early ones (e.g. from prologue, chapter 1) still get listed even though they're no longer present in my local save folder.

The remote storage usage seems to fluctuate on quota exceeds. I saw that it dropped to from 900MB+ to 400-500MB and have absolutely no idea what got purged and what got retained at the remote side. What I do know for sure is the local and remote sides are messily out of sync, and the game/Steam does not appear to know about it.

[Human Jerky]

Sorry to revive an old thread but I'm having this issue with Oblivion!

[Human Jerky]

I exceeded the limit on cloud saves with mods installed that altered the oblivion.esm file, which is weird because that means game files that have nothing to do with saves were sucked into the cloud.

The saves do not install nor are listed anywhere besides the cloud log, and the remotecache file. They do not appear to be downloaded anywhere but the corrupted game files do download.

[La valeria]

trough the route
C:\Users\YOURNAMEUSER\Documents\The Witcher\saves