Lost all progress!

[iddalai]

I had unlocked everything up to Skyway, then I didn't play for a couple of days, today I launched the game and everything was locked.

I don't play this game on other platforms, I didn't make any change to my OS.

Any thoughts?

[jim.buck]

Hmm, what OS are you playing on? I did see some weird things with multi-platform playing, that I could never track down, and based on experience with porting other Steam games, I suspected it was some weird Steam client bug that would very seldom happen.

[iddalai]

Heya, thanks for the quick reply!

I'm using Windows XP SP3.
I don't use multi-platform, I only play Steam games on this PC.

I have "cloud saves" disabled, I have them disabled for at least a couple of years.

[jim.buck]

Check to see if you have any files here: <your Steam directory>\userdata\<your user number>\209690 and under the 'remote' directory there. If you see under 'remote' these: user_defaults.plist and saves\default.usr, something may have gone weird with the Steam client not respecting the cloud save setting.

[iddalai]

Inside the "209690\remote" folder I have an empty "Saves" folder and a "user_defaults.plist" file.

There's no "default.usr" under "Saves".

Any clues?

[jim.buck]

What is the date/timestamp of user_defaults.plist? Also, could you email me that user_defaults.plist file? Go to my profile, which will tell you my company website, and go to the "contact" page, where the generic email address is.

[jim.buck]

Also, look in <where you installed Steam>\SteamApps\common\fieldrunners and the subdirectories 'Saves' and 'Data' for any of these same files. If you have them, please send those as well.

[iddalai]

Thanks for the reply!

The email has been sent! :)

[jim.buck]

Hey, thanks for emailing that stuff!

Unfortunately, I don't see anything weird in those files (for example, I was expecting to see a bunch of stuff unlocked but that Steam stupidly put these files in the "upload to the cloud" directory despite you saying to not use the cloud). :( And if you don't have user_defaults.plist in your non-cloud Steam directory, I don't have a good way of trying to hack your way to getting back to what you had. :( And, generally, I don't have a good answer to this other than I think there's been a couple reports of this problem on this forum for the past couple/few years, but the best I've heard is that the Steam client every once in a great, great, great while does Weird Things(tm) with their cloud tech. Not that that is an explanation, but it's the closest I've heard to what could be going on.

Having said that, the crash dump you also emailed is a bit weird. The fact it happened before you saw this problem is a bit suspect since, if it happened literally before the game tried to write out your latest snapshot of levels unlocked, then this could totally be the problem. But without knowing the timing of the crash, it's hard to say for sure.

[iddalai]

That's really frustrating :(

Thanks for trying!

[jim.buck]

No problem, I try when I can, but dang, it's been so long since working on this game that the code is probably wildly different these days, otherwise I might have been able to do something with the dump to at least identify the cause of a crash. I wish we had thought to lock in the .exe and associated source code that went along with the shipped .exe on Steam.

[deadio42]

I had everything unlocked - lots of scores, etc. - everything working fine for months .. now everything gets repeatedly wiped out - it might stay saved for a day or two, but within a very short time everythign I've unlocked gets reset - Steam still thinks I've completed a huge portoin of the game, but everything is locked back up - very annoying and will likely have to abandon the game - can't very well keep play classic easy and nothing else.

[deadio42]

scrolling through discussion I see a number of different entries on this so I guess it's not just me - desktop only running Windows 7 - not played on anything else, etc., etc.

[jim.buck]

All the unlocked/etc. get saved to the cloud account, regardless of playing on a different platform or not.. Steam just saved it to the hard drive and uploads that hard drive data to your cloud account.. so, it's odd that it keeps getting blown away. The Steam SDK is a bit of a black box in this area, so if there's some weird edge case in the Steam .dll causing this, I have no guesses as to figure out what's causing it. The only thing I can think of is do you plenty of hard drive space? Are you connected to the internet when playing? Lame questions, I know, but that's all that immediately comes to mind.

[deadio42]

Over 400 gigs free space - unless the internet is down for some reason, always connected. Dead end there, but worth a shot.

[jim.buck]

Hmm, yeah...I mean, I've got nothing else that comes to mind. It's also been years since I worked on this project, but I'm still familiar with how the code worked, and I can't think of a sequence of actions the game could take that would totally blow away the save stuff unless the save data became corrupted.. but I can't think of anything that would caused it be corrupted outside of the game or Windows crashing while the game was in the middle of saving out data. Did you have a recent game or Windows crash before you saw this problem?