Hold up with the patches, do this RIGHT

Nerds got to stick together XD.

 

@falkor99
So, you can't. Gotcha mate. Guess it isn't as easy as you try to make it sound.
(Not even trying to sound clever, unlike you Mr. "Programmer"~)

 

It is trivial. It is commonplace. Every software program you've ever updated probably reads in their old data and saves it in a new format. If you are the developer and have the //source code//, that is.

And all these people who think its wonderful when a game wipes your saves, exactly how much coding experience do you have? And please list the other games you play that do this as well. List them all I'm really very curious.

 

Rewrote the save game format so we can add items without breaking everything. (Oops.) (This may also break current save games, although we tried our hardest to make sure this isn’t the case.) This is from their blog falkor.

 

Don't know why you people are piling on Falkor99. He's 100% correct.
I've been playing games since 1986, and I can only think of one other game (in the DOS era) where updating the game would break previous game saves completely... and you can bet that ticked off players then, too.

I have 95 Steam games installed right now that auto-update all the time, and I've never worried about them getting broken in the process. Suggesting that you should turn off auto-updates for Steam games is *stupid*. Seriously. The Q&A process should be solid enough that you don't have to babysit updates and check out news on forums to know if something got broken or not.

I'm not that upset, though, looks like newest update says these saves will be recoverable. I'll just play something else tonight... I'm just annoyed at some of these posts. Guess what? I'm not a programmer. But I do work in Q&A at a software company

 

But @zenoldc do you not see what i posted? They did this prevent this happening further on. Surely you can see how this is better now in the first few weeks than possibly months down the line?

 

Are you saying my save game won't be recoverable until months down the line?
If not, and my save game will work soon, then they could've waited until they were sure it would not break save games.

Like Falkor suggested, they could've both fixed the save game format while retaining compatibility. It IS relatively simple. They know what the previous format was, and they know what they want it to be in this new version. Either first time patch installs, or first time old save game gets loaded under new patch, the application reads out the old save game into memory, backs it up, and then converts it into new savegame format. Alternatively, it allows you to load the game as normal, but you won't see new items/features until you create a new save game.

Look at Terraria. Another great indie game. Their updates add tons of new items, new enemies, new habitats, etc. If you want to see some of the new stuff, your character and all its items still load fine, but you carry it over to a new world/save game.

 

Well, that's certainly true, it's not necessarily a "trivial" task as far as manhours goes. It can take me several workdays just to test one overhaul. Data conversion projects and tools can take even longer. We're not privy to the code to know how much goes into the savegame format.

However, "trivial" may not be too far off, either... They already have the load game function from the previous version. And they should have an updated save game function for the new format. There's not a whole lot of extra code that needs to be written to connect the two. This would actually be more time consuming on the Q&A side than on the development side IMO.

 

From Something Awful forums:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3415180&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=63

"First off, a hotfix is now up for the load/save issue. You can grab it at http://www.gaslampgames.com/dredmor_hotfix.zip - unzip it into your Steam/steamapps/common/dungeons of dredmor/ and let it overwrite Dungeons of Dredmor.exe. That will get all old save games up and running (at least all of the broken ones that we have found so far.)

If the Assembled Goonery wants to test it on their broken saves, we can push this out in the morning as soon as Valve is back in the office and somebody makes the coffee. You might get what the folks on IRC are calling a "phantom save"; I'm not sure what that's about, but I think it's just because character saves are now using the full name of the characters rather than the first five letters as an index.

I'm not going to get into this in too much detail, because I'm tired and am basically running on nothing but fumes at this point, but here's some brief notes.

First off, let it be noted that I do, in fact, have my name on a Derek Smart Joint. (Graphics Programmer, Universal Combat: A World Apart. I was young and I needed the money.)

Second off, obviously this is our mess and we made it; now we get to live with it. I am not happy with the fact that we have been having teething troubles after launch. This is, bluntly, not how I want Gaslamp Games to be run.

The simple fact of the matter is that we were not expecting sales in the volume that we got, and we were not expecting the response that we got. I honestly thought we would make ten thousand sales during the entire lifetime of the product. We are... doing somewhat better than that, and as a result we are doing our best to try to deal with the fact that we now have to support a massive user base, with no money, no staff, and no time. Consequently, we have been scrabbling around trying to get everything sorted out, and when we were testing the reasonably large patch that was about to come out, this slipped through the cracks at the last minute. We didn't go back and re-test the savegames after we put together a last minute fix for a shopkeeper issue, and ka-blam, there's nothing left to do but to pick up the bodies. It's a mess, and our forums are probably on fire as well... I haven't had the heart to look.

So, yep.

To be honest, I agree with Abey Sinclair. I don't need white knighting; I've been a programmer for twenty-two years, a commercial game developer on everything from the Unreal Engine to the Aforementioned Derek Smart for eleven of them, and I've shipped enough stuff to know when it's Our Fuckup. And yep, this one was us. There's nothing to say other than "Sodding, Buggering Hell."

At the same time, I am happy that this is the *only* crash report so far that has been confirmed as reproducible in Dungeons of Dredmor 1.0.3. So that's good news. Obviously there is some other stuff that we will have to straighten out - vampirism, balance tweaks, whatever the heck is going on with the dual wielding, mod support, the planned social engineering stuff, and I'm sure there is at least one more crash bug lurking out there waiting to strike! - but we have now reached the point where I feel like I can finally sit down, stop running, and take a breather.

The only reason we put an achievement in for crashing was because we figured that the game was stable enough that this would no longer be an issue. Hence it might be coveted, instead of something that everybody now gets. Bleh.

I am, admittedly, surprised that this is an issue with a permadeath game. I didn't actually think that enough people would care that much about their characters and their runs in the worst case scenario that we broke the save game format. Shows what I know.

As soon as things calm down and I get this hotfix out properly, I will be building some serious regression testing for save games so that this Does Not. Happen. Again. It was on the TODO list, and we didn't get to it for this patch, because we wanted to deal with the Stairs bug and other issues. (Interestingly, the Stairs Bug was missed by one hundred fellow Goon beta testers over the course of a month and a half. It's been in the code base for five years. Go team.) As soon as I actually get a royalty cheque, we are also going to invest in some hardware to do more automated testing and hardware compatibility checking. We don't get paid for another forty-five days or so, which means we're all still eating ramen.

I am also going to take a few days off to try and catch up on my sleep, so I feel less stressed out about having an Indie Hit on my hands that I'm not totally sure how to deal with, to be frank.

Anyhow, as always, we are here to listen to your concerns. I want Gaslamp to be the kind of company that is awesome, listens to its user base, and puts out a good product. If we're not doing that, we need to know so that we can fix it.

That was a little longer than I thought, but oh well. Other than the save fiasco, how are people enjoying 1.0.3?

- nvining"

so maybe you guys could help with testing the hotfix now? Instead of arguing about programmers/game designers etc etc

 

Good to hear I can use my save again.

On a sidenote, it seems like Gaslamp has a very fast, dedicated programmer, a lot has been fixed in a short amount of time

but it was just a bad judgement call to say "nah let's get the patch out now, the save thing isn't a big issue."

 

It does happen in software development at some point or another. I got transferred into a Q&A position exactly because of a "rush" fix like this breaking everything during our busy season. Now nothing releases without me giving it the go ahead, but guess what? I've still missed a minor bug or two in my testing.

This developer above did the 2 things that made customers appreciate me, and makes me appreciate Gaslamp as well:
-Honest feedback on what the situation was
-Willing to say "whelp, we fucked up. Honestly. Sorry about that."

You don't see bigger software houses do the 2nd one very often, and admitting mistakes is very endearing.

 

You also don't see many developers still working after they just release a patch. Usually they release the patch, say "Whelp we fixed it!" then they go out for a beer and a lay.

 

Programmers yes... Other employees... no. Support/Customer Service/Q&A are the ones that have to really focus on customer impact and get most of the heat. Programmers are usually insulated in those regards so they can focus.

 

(heart) 1 day to patch a bug. Kudos. Take your time on the next patch please, we (the customers) will find more ways to bug your game (minorly) then pester you over it.

 

I must agree though, it is a permadeath game. Losing one run is really not that big a deal. I'm guessing most of the people doing the whining don't usually play roguelikes.

 

I guess the bright side of this whole fiasco is, the fact players are raising a storm over it shows that the game is popular. =D

 

i have never ran into any game crashes before and i think the developers did a much better job than many other BIG game developers in terms of number of game crashes prior to game release... cough* falloutnv cough*

But i think u are just throwing a tantrum. If ur save gt deleted, ur save gt deleted. Suck it up and quit whining

 

You know for all those claiming that the developer staff is stupid and they don't know what they are doing yadi yadi ya I just want to take you down a stroll on Memory line.

There is a rather famous hack and slay game, with alot of characters and skill in the past, developed by a huge company, who patched this game alot and..guess what happens, after a certain patch save games can break, I'm talking about Diablo 2, where you needed to "convert" your save games around the patch 1.7 or 1.9 and you know what happend if something was wrong with the conversation, I tell you : Jack shit.

You couldn't get your save game back and because you covnerted it you couldn't load it up with the older clients, so can you please keep your mouth shut now, first people are storming in demanding a Patch and when they get one they demand hundreds of hours testing beforehand, which is simply not doable. So if you got you precious saves somewhere and you are afraid of loosing them, than just make a copy of it before you patch.

Now remember how long did we have to wait for this huge patch to come out..a few days and we just payed 4 Bucks for this game or 4 euros for other..well lets just say its around that amount of money, so yeah I can claim I got my money worth, because 4 Euros are next to nothing for us users. Now you know that piece of shit Minecraft..I payed almost 4 Times as much and at one point had to wait around half an year for an update that was ~mainly~ just taking ideas and existing mods from the community and apply them, so yeah I rather am a Betatester for a patch to make it better, than for a boring ass game that is basically betraying me with the whole "Ohh we will develop the game, you just need to wait years for further upgrades"

 

Heh, in all fairness, you didn't buy a final release of Minecraft. The site makes it very clear you literally ARE paying to beta test
And yes, I never experienced any bugs whatsoever until the update caused crashing on loading my saves... but that hotfix worked beautifully and I really wasn't that upset in the first place. I was just confused as to what was going on and found out on these forums that's why my game was crashing.