[General] - Savegame corrupted

[despairbear]

Bug Submission:

Category: General

Platform: PC

Issue Title: Savegame corrupted

Issue Description: I started Invisible, Inc. today and all of my savegame slots are empty, replaced with "Start New Game".

There is a savegame.lua in my Klei\InvisibleInc\saves directory, so I suppose it is simply corrupt? I'm attaching it.

I am playing the game on Steam with the Steam Cloud enabled.

The last time I played the game, I had just beaten it on Experienced mode and then exited via the main menu. There were no power cuts or hard process stops.

Steps to Reproduce: Unclear. I played the game normally last night, and today my save is just gone.

The last thing I did before exiting last night was *almost* start a new campaign - that is, I went into "Campaign Generation", then poked around the difficulty settings for a while, then backed out and exited without starting anything.

[despairbear]

Also, even if I copy a previously backed-up savegame.lua on top of the one in documents\klei, then my savegame slots still all appear empty! 

 

Apparently, the game immediately overwrites my backed-up savegame.lua with corrupt one. This occurs even if I am running Steam in offline mode and have unchecked "Enable Steam Cloud synchronization for Invisible, Inc."

[despairbear]

Also, even if I copy a previously backed-up savegame.lua on top of the one in documents\klei, then my savegame slots still all appear empty! 

 

Apparently, the game immediately overwrites my backed-up savegame.lua with corrupt one. This occurs even if I am running Steam in offline mode and have unchecked "Enable Steam Cloud synchronization for Invisible, Inc."

 

It turns out the stomping behavior is because the Steam Cloud version of the file overwrites the game version even if "Steam Cloud synchronization" is disabled.

 

But the original corruption of the savegame is the real bug.

[despairbear]

Yes, this appears to happen whenever I end a campaign, but then exit "campaign generation" screen before starting a new one.  It happens both when ending a campaign in victory and also when doing "Retire agency."

 

So there's an easy repro:

 

1. While partway through a mission,
2. select options->"retire agency."
3. click through dialogs until eventually you click the "Restart campaign" button.
4. Now you are on "campaign generation."
5. Press "log out" to return to main menu
6. Press "play game"
7. Note that all save slots are empty and replaced with "Start new game."

[Sander Bouwhuis]

I have EXACTLY the same problem! I also sometimes play offline and my savegame is gone (doesn't work anymore). I also had the problem EXACTLY after I ended a campaign (retired a team in enless mode)! This is clearly a bug.

 

Here is the link to the same bug as mentioned by DespairBear : http://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/54574-crash-savegame-is-gone-and-steam-creates-a-dump-file/

 

Klei, please help us!

[rooks]

Can somebody post one of their problematic save game files? (on Windows, Documents/Klei/savegames/savegame.lua).

 

You are correct about the Steam cloud version stomping this local file: the game doesn't actually load from this file in the Release version of the game -- it exists only as a ghost for easy access to the save data for problems like these.  I'm hoping it's a problem with the game and not Steam cloud, because then we can actually fix it.

 

@despairbear.  Thanks for the repro steps!  Unfortunately I haven't gotten the bug to occur using those steps. There is some subtlety that we're missing, but I'll keep poking around.

 

 

[despairbear]

I attached a faulty savegame.lua to the original bug submission. Here it is again.

 

Eyeballing the .lua file, it looks like the "saveSlots" table is empty when it should have a reference to the campaign in objects[ 0x00000005 ]. But simply splicing in the boldfaced line below doesn't work, so there must be more to it than that.

 

    local table

    table = objects [ 0x00000001 ]
    table [ "saveSlots" ] = objects [ 0x00000002 ]
    table [ "retail" ] = true
    table [ "gamesStarted" ] = true
    table [ "lastSaveSlot" ] = 4

    // etc

    table = objects [ 0x00000002 ]

    table[1] = objects[ 0x00000005 ]

    table = objects [ 0x00000005 ]
    table [ "monsterPlotPoint" ] = 4
    table [ "currentDay" ] = 3
    table [ "recent_build_number" ] = [==[bUILD[branches/Launch.137043] LUA[137054] USER[10895970@steam]
OS: Windows (WOW64).6.2.23F0]==]

savegame - Copy.lua

[rooks]

Unfortunately it looks that savegame's save slots were already clobbered as per your observation so there's no clues as to *how* it might've gotten clobbered.

 

Just to rule out a few things:

* Is everyone playing the stock game build? (no modifications to the game files or to their savegame.lua)

* Was a Custom game, or an Endless mode being played when the bug occured?

* Does anyone notice a savegame.lua.bak file in their save folder?  If so, could you post this fellow?

 

despairbear: Do your repro steps still consistently cause the issue?  (ie. retiring one of your save slots as per the repro steps causes other save slots to be cleared out)  If so, your help could be invaluable in figuring out what the difference between your configuration and ours could be.

 

Thanks folks!

[despairbear]

I've actually got a complete version history on my savegame.lua because I junctioned klei/invisibleinc/saves/... to my Dropbox folder after the initial corruption. So I'm attaching pre- and post-clobbering versions of the file to this post. (note: these are immediately successive versions of the file, but I don't remember exactly what I did between them. I think this is from when I was trying to narrow down the repro.)

 

I think I remember seeing a savegame.lua.bak appear and then disappear while I was watching  the folder, but when I look in the folder's version history I don't see it there, so maybe the .bak actually appears in the steam/.../remote directory?

 

My repro steps were 100% last night, but I only tried them with a single save game slot populated, so I don't know if retiring slot A also causes slot B to vanish. I'll try that when I get home.

 

edit: also I'm playing a completely stock game build, using the stock Experienced difficulty level with no custom modifications of any kind.

savegame.lua.before.txt

savegame.lua.after.txt

[Sander Bouwhuis]

I played a custom endless when it happened (I attached my savegame in this thread : http://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/54574-crash-savegame-is-gone-and-steam-creates-a-dump-file/)

But, it also happened when I played a standard experienced run (to unlock the last 2 programs).

 

Please note that Steam also created dump files when the problem occurred! I have also attached those to my post.