osu! songs no longer showing up

[Potato Jones]

For the last 4 days or so, we have been playing the osu! songs provided with the osu! download for holodance. Well, about 3 hours ago we opened it up to play some more (as it's a great daily workout) and the songs weren't there.
We have exhausted our troubleshooting abilities after 3 hours of trying everything we can think of. Still nothing showing up. We have tried the new installer and the old. We found the new one downloads into the appdata folder and holodance does not recognize anything from there, it gives an error. But when you use the old installer, the error doesn't show but nothing shows up.
Please fix this or let us know how to fix it, what we are doing wrong, if we're doing something wrong.
It is such a fun game and we would really love to continue playing it as the story mode is pretty limited and tedious right now.

[jashan]

Hi Jason, I'm sorry to hear about this! I'm just returning from a little meditation retreat and will be back in the office tomorrow or the day after. But I'll definitely be online tomorrow (it's exactly midnight and I'm just about to go to sleep).

Did you add new songs before this happened? I did have reports of certain beatmaps crashing the file scanner which may cause what you are seeing. The workaround is to temporarily remove those beatmaps; a proper fix will be in the next release.

What exactly do you mean by new and old installer?

One thing you could try (if you haven't tried already) is renaming the osu file cache JSON file. That will trigger a complete re-scan of your osu songs-folder. That file is either in the main Holodance-folder or Holodance_Data. If you have already played a lot, you should not delete that JSON file because we currently keep track of a few things in that file and if you delete it that information will be lost.

Also, can you send the file output_log.txt (this one definitely is in Holodance_Data) to jashan at narayana minus games dot net (or simply take the address available at: http://narayana-games.net/Contact.aspx)

I hope one of the above suggestions already fixes the issue for you but if not, I'll make sure you get your library up and running again in the next few days.

Apologies for the troubles!

[Potato Jones]

Thank you so much! Renaming that cache JSON file worked! Thank you! :D

When I loaded up the game first, there was no songs. I thought to myself that maybe the songs were only available for a limited time so maybe that was why there was none. So I went onto osu! to get a set of beatmaps and there was still nothing there. So I did try and add new songs but that was after this had happened.

And what I meant about the new and old installer was that on the osu! download, you could click on the big link to download or under it, the middle selection is the old installer, that one installs it in the program files. The big link installs it in app data.

But it is now fixed! And I thank you very much!

[jashan]

Ah, that's great news! Now I can go to sleep and sleep well ;-)

Apologies once more for the hassle - I'm really sorry to hear you went through hours of troubleshooting. One thing I'll add just as a safeguard for cases like this is a way to kill the cache. What the current refresh button does is only trigger reloading the cache-file, which can be useful in some cases but obviously didn't fix the problem you've had (and at least one other, probably more players were having).

Hope you're having a great time playing now ;-)

[Thrash Bandicoot]

I also had a problem with this. After adding and removing some songs from osu nothing would load up (in Holodance) initially except the favorites or last played songs (and after a few moments). After a while, the entire song library sometimes loaded but it was give or take on whether a new song I added would appear in the list or not. Eventually, I consistently got this error in-game http://imgur.com/nh9FOIi However, everything loaded up fine after I deleted the FileSystemCache_Osu.json file in the holodance steam folder. Unfortunately (as you stated above), this clears all the local information on scores/favorites and such :( At least the high scores made on the songs are safe :) I'll send my output_log.txt to the address you listed.

[jashan]

Thanks for the screenshot - that does help a lot because it tells me that under certain circumstances (probably something with Unicode titles), the JSON file gets corrupted and then cannot be parsed anymore. That's fairly nasty, especially because the information isn't sufficient to write a fix, yet. But it's good to know this issue exists and it's kind of likely that it will occur again (which is both a bad and a good thing, a good thing because when it happens again we can gather more information).

The best way for me to fix this would be getting my hands on one of those FileSystemCache_Osu.json files. Please don't delete them ;-) ... just rename them! ;-)

One benefit of having a corrupt version is that it's not too hard for me to merge the information from the corrupt file into a new file. Obviously, I can't do this for lots of people but if it's just a few, that's quite easy.

I hope that the logfile will have some useful information. Unfortunately, those logfiles are overwritten each time the game starts, so the best time to grab that file is directly after a problem occurred. I'm looking into ways to make getting this information more hassle free ;-)