Steam cloud save improvements
Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:43 pm
Right now, I wanted to reactivate the steam cloud feature to try syncing my current game with my other computer. And what happened (it seems) was that the game instantly copied the very old obsolete saves that were in the Steam Cloud back over my current game. So sad :'( Well, don't worry about that save cause I was getting bored of it anyway. But from a technical point of view, the Steam cloud saves aren't very well handled.
It seems the reason is because the game tries to use the cloud as a place to backup the saves and copy them back in the local save folders. The problem is that there's no clean way to do that really and can cause out of sync errors, up to corruptions.
The solution is to embrace the Steam cloud completely. Aka, a save is either 100% in the cloud, or 100% in the local HDD but won't try to be in both. Aka, you treat the cloud as a folder that is separate from the one normal saves got and just present that information in the user interface. Along with a control to move a save from one "folder" to the other.
I should know about it. I tried to make a save system that used the steam cloud in such a backup way and lost countless saves :'( At the minimum, by never copying the saves from one side to the other, it'd prevent save deletion from happening like it did for me. The only risk left would be Steam making mistakes while doing a sync which would then not be Tome's fault at all.
It seems the reason is because the game tries to use the cloud as a place to backup the saves and copy them back in the local save folders. The problem is that there's no clean way to do that really and can cause out of sync errors, up to corruptions.
The solution is to embrace the Steam cloud completely. Aka, a save is either 100% in the cloud, or 100% in the local HDD but won't try to be in both. Aka, you treat the cloud as a folder that is separate from the one normal saves got and just present that information in the user interface. Along with a control to move a save from one "folder" to the other.
I should know about it. I tried to make a save system that used the steam cloud in such a backup way and lost countless saves :'( At the minimum, by never copying the saves from one side to the other, it'd prevent save deletion from happening like it did for me. The only risk left would be Steam making mistakes while doing a sync which would then not be Tome's fault at all.