Game will not save

[Captain Cranium]

As the topic says - no matter where I am in the game, on the Geoscape or the Tactical mode, saving games appears to work, but whenever I go to load anything I always get nothing but a blank page.  Checking my '...\Documents\My Games\Xenonauts 2\saves folder also always shows an empty folder.  I have edited permissions to the folder as much as I possibly can, and I always start the game as administrator.  Autosaves are not forming either, despite messages displaying that they are.

 

My questions are twofold -

(1) the obviously implied one (why is this happening/how do I fix it/etc), and

(2) is there some way to change the save game location entirely?  Perhaps if I'm able to choose a different folder it will work.

[Chris]

21 hours ago, Captain Cranium said:

As the topic says - no matter where I am in the game, on the Geoscape or the Tactical mode, saving games appears to work, but whenever I go to load anything I always get nothing but a blank page.  Checking my '...\Documents\My Games\Xenonauts 2\saves folder also always shows an empty folder.  I have edited permissions to the folder as much as I possibly can, and I always start the game as administrator.  Autosaves are not forming either, despite messages displaying that they are.

 

My questions are twofold -

(1) the obviously implied one (why is this happening/how do I fix it/etc), and

(2) is there some way to change the save game location entirely?  Perhaps if I'm able to choose a different folder it will work.

Hi there - so this is quite an interesting issue. My suspicion is that this is something to do with your antivirus software, but this bug does affect people occasionally so it'd be great for us to try and figure out what's going on.

First question: if your \saves\ folder is empty, are there files in the rest of the \Xenonauts 2\ directory? I'm guessing there are, otherwise the game would have crashed on startup.

Second question: what antivirus software are you running? Is it quarantining or automatically deleting the save files? Although our save games are just text files, they do contain some elements that resemble a .zip file so they might be getting wiped out while the other files are considered fine.

It is possible to change the save game directory file but I doubt that'll help much in this situation. I'll let you know how if this antivirus stuff doesn't fix the problem

[Captain Cranium]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply.  To your questions:

1.  You mean in the Xenonauts 2 folder in the Documents/My Games folder I assume?  Mostly there are only folders - BugReports, Mods, Saves, and Settings - and all are empty save for settings, which contains a number of .json files.  If you meant the folder within the GOG/games/Xenonauts 2 folder then yes of course, the executable and all the appropriate looking libraries and such are there.

2. This answer is slightly more complicated - Windows Defender, as I am running Windows 11, but I have tried turning it off briefly, and also have added Xenonauts 2 as an exclusion to its exclusion list (both its folders and its processes), and controlled folder access is off.  The only complication is that I am running Windows 11 inside of Parallels - so technically there is also Bitdefender running on the parent OS for Parallels (MacOS in this case) - but this has never prevented a Windows installed program from being able to form save files in the past.  Before you ask, I have shut off Bitdefender's active protection - it's easy to temporarily turn it off for a time, but even when I do, the saves do not form.

EDIT:  Also, I just looked into Windows Defender more deeply, and it shows no recent activity in terms of having identified and/or removed and/or quarantined threats.  It's all green arrows stating that everything is under control and there are no threats.

Edited August 15, 2024 by Captain Cranium

[Chris]

On 8/16/2024 at 12:07 AM, Captain Cranium said:

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply.  To your questions:

1.  You mean in the Xenonauts 2 folder in the Documents/My Games folder I assume?  Mostly there are only folders - BugReports, Mods, Saves, and Settings - and all are empty save for settings, which contains a number of .json files.  If you meant the folder within the GOG/games/Xenonauts 2 folder then yes of course, the executable and all the appropriate looking libraries and such are there.

2. This answer is slightly more complicated - Windows Defender, as I am running Windows 11, but I have tried turning it off briefly, and also have added Xenonauts 2 as an exclusion to its exclusion list (both its folders and its processes), and controlled folder access is off.  The only complication is that I am running Windows 11 inside of Parallels - so technically there is also Bitdefender running on the parent OS for Parallels (MacOS in this case) - but this has never prevented a Windows installed program from being able to form save files in the past.  Before you ask, I have shut off Bitdefender's active protection - it's easy to temporarily turn it off for a time, but even when I do, the saves do not form.

EDIT:  Also, I just looked into Windows Defender more deeply, and it shows no recent activity in terms of having identified and/or removed and/or quarantined threats.  It's all green arrows stating that everything is under control and there are no threats.

Thanks for the reply. That's interesting to hear. So this is a strange situation because the game is clearly capable of writing to that directory given it created the settings files.

It's possible to change the install directory by adding-gameSaveFolder=<X> to the startup path in Steam / GOG / whatever. I'm not 100% sure how Parallels works but perhaps moving it might fix things?

If not, we'll have another think about what could be causing it. However it sounds like you've already checked most of the things we'd suggest - it's Windows Defender and controlled folder access in Windows that have caused problems for other users historically. I'm not a Mac user but it sounds like you've already tried disabling the equivalents.

EDIT - actually, one thing that would be useful is to make a bug report using F11 after trying to make a save. Hopefully that'll create a zip file in the /bugreports/ folder that will have some data we might be able to use to debug the issue.