12/05/10 update enables Steam cloud

[Scared]

If I was a betting man I might think that the game has been updated in preperation for a Mac release....you know maybe with Steam.

Luckily I am not a betting person so my money is safe with me.

Braid Update Released
Product Update - Valve
Updates to Braid have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Braid
Enabled Steam Cloud support for Braid saved games
Fixed a graphical glitch when opening the menu

edit: It seems that there is an initial big that causes people to lose their save files, a fix is on the way.
edit2: Apparently it is now live.

[FLeK0]

Well, this update wiped my game progress. I found the old save file in appdata/roaming/braid, but it doesn't seem to work.

[Scared]

It seems my saves have been wiped as well....bugger.

[ants280]

Lucky me! I just wiped my steam drive on accident a week ago. Now I know my game will still exist once I do it again! (on accident, of course!)

Quest for stars v2.0!

[CynicalNinja]

Actually, it didn't wipe the saves; it just changed their location.

The old location was:
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Braid

The new path seems to be:
C:\Program Files\Steam\userdata\[user number?]\26800\remote

That said, I copied my save from the old location to the new one, and it still didn't work. Hmm.

[Jonathan Blow]

Hi guys,

Sorry about the bug.

There was a small error that got into the code but sometimes small mistakes have consequences. Hopefully though, peoples' saves are not lost.

I am submitting an update right now that should fix this, but I don't know if it will go live before the morning.

[Scared]

sometimes small mistakes have consequences

haha. That is true...Although sometimes the results can be hilarious /thinks back to student project....

[Jonathan Blow]

I am told that the fix is now live.

I am not sure, but those of who who tried out the earlier version might have had your save files overwritten for whichever slots you played. My apologies for that. It is pretty easy to copy a save file from a friend...

[radiohat]

so can I now restore my old saves (from the pre-cloud era) which are roughly 1 KB in size contrary to new saves which are about 90 bytes?

[Jonathan Blow]

The way it works is, if you have saved files from the Cloud, and also older saved files pre-Cloud, (for the same save slots), it will look at them to see which one is the "best" (in terms of how far through the game / best speed run times / etc) and use that one. Then, when you save from then on, it will save to the Cloud.

So yeah, if you restore your old saves, they ought to work (provided you put them where they usually go, not trying to overwrite the steam cloud files). If they don't, that's another bug, and we'll fix it!

[radiohat]

Thanks a lot... I tried that before the update and it failed. Now it worked. Thanks again. :)

[The_3lder]

The update worked without any problems for me. Downloaded, launched the game, played a bit. No save games were wiped out. Thanks for the update :D

[Scared]

I am told that the fix is now live.

I tried the game again and was able to continue from where I saved. When I first started before the fix I never actually saved the game so I guess nothing was overwritten.

Thanks for the update :)

[Tharon]

Doesn't seem to work well

Braid can read savegames from application data folder, but doesn't synch them. If i delete both savegames (the ones in application data folder and steam userdata folder) the game is unable to retrieve them from steam cloud.

Also cloud seems to don't sync time trials score at all.

[FuuKuy]

Thanks Jonathan for include STEAM Cloud. It's a GREAT feature.

[Jonathan Blow]

Tharon: The game doesn't auto-sync all of your old saves the first time you run. Rather, what happens is, any time a saved game gets updated (due to you moving around the game world or whatever), it now gets saved both to Steam Cloud and the local disk.

So if you want to sync your old saved games, you would just load them up, run around a little, and quit. (I think you have to at least go past the story screen into a world for this to happen.)

The reason it doesn't auto-sync all your old saves is, well, it is safest not to mess with old data. The way we thought of this update is that it's mainly meant for new players of the game, so that stuff will be on Steam Cloud by default.

[morpmex]

I just came here to say this.

Very awesome move! using steam cloud is really nice :)

[serieus1]

Wow, Braid gets an update. That's just amazing coming from such a small team. Thanks for the support Number None. Steam Cloud is something that was asked about a long time ago since Number None tried to implement it, but stopped short in case of making more problems than necessary. Now, it's perfect. Great listening to the community on this one.

As for the preparation to the MAC, I'm sure that Number None is cleaning up things that the community has asked for, such as full SteamCloud support. But, there already is a Mac version of this game out, which I'm sure will be featured on the new MAC Steam platform.

Good for them, a game like Braid shouldn't be missed.

[Tharon]

Damn, i just made a mess trying to sync with steam cloud without touching my perfect save.

I made another game in a new slot, not knowing i cannot delete them. Now the new slot is permanent on cloud :(

[RSkin]

I'm still having some issues with Steam Cloud and Mac integration. I've got Braid installed on both the Mac and XP partitions of my computer, and I can't get the Mac version to properly sync. It presents me with a new game instead of my old Windows files. If I try to play it, it works fine. Until I boot into Windows.

As an example, I played through the first level, collecting the first 3 puzzle pieces. Put them together in a corner. Boot into windows. Run Braid. What do I get? This. (http://i.imgur.com/2iVaP.jpg)

Notice the three pieces in the left corner. Those were firmly attached to the rest of the puzzle before. It looks to me like Steam is unsuccessfully trying to stitch the two save files together, thus tearing apart the puzzle. On the plus side, this may be a way of getting that one secret that everyone complains about and that I don't want to spoil. On the minus side, god knows what this could do to my 100% Windows saves.

I've spent far too much time and energy trying to fix this, copying files here and there, figuring out all the places where the save files are kept, and trashing them, and replacing them with the windows ones... nothing works.

This may have been caused by me booting up Braid on Mac (thus committing a save to the cloud) before I applied the Steam Cloud-enabling update on Windows. Maybe. Just a hunch I have. Any ideas on what I can do to fix it? Are the two incompatible? And if so, why is it merging them?

[Jonathan Blow]

Hmm, no, this is an unforeseen problem in the way we did the steam cloud integration.

We are going to have to fix it...

[FuuKuy]

if you want to sync your old saved games, you would just load them up, run around a little, and quit. (I think you have to at least go past the story screen into a world for this to happen.)


Worked. Thanks again Jonathan.

[p0ddi]

Sorry, if it's the wrong thread, but I just wanted to ask the developer a question:

Will there be a Braid Demo for Mac soon? Yesterday I installed Steam on my Mac and saw the Steam Play logo on the Braid Product site. So I downloaded the Demo and wondered why Steam stays "this product is not available for your platform".

Greetings from Germany
p0ddi

[Jonathan Blow]

The demo thing may just be a bug in the way the game is registered with Steam. I will talk to the Valve guys about it.

[Jonathan Blow]

I'm told that the demo should now be marked as available on the Mac.

[Maccer]

I have a Windows - Mac sync problem, too.

I have purchased Braid on Steam (for Windows) last year and have been playing in Bootcamp. There I had unlocked 56 puzzle pieces. Sometimes I have been playing Braid without having an internet connection.

I installed Steam for Mac today. When I loaded Braid, I was given a much older game with only 25 unlocked puzzle pieces. I don't understand where it does get that saved game from. I have had the Braid Mac demo installed earlier, but the demo won't let you unlock that many pieces so the saved game must somehow come from Steam.

In order to try to make Braid update its progress to Steam Cloud, I played some more in the Windows version today. I managed to get the last puzzle piece in world 5, and made a new saved game slot at position 3 which then showed 57 unlocked pieces. Before I did that, only slot 1 had a saved game in it. I got the "Solved World 5" achievment, and it's shown as achieved in the achievments list in the Steam client, but it still says that the Most Recent achievment is "Solved World 3". The "time played" was updated as well from 92 to 94 minutes – even though my "real" time played is much longer than that - the old 92 minutes could be the time spent to get 25 pieces, but it sounds too short for even that.

After restarting in MacOS, the Mac version now had a saved game on slot 3 as well, so it's doing some kind of Steam Cloud syncing. Slot 3 showed today's date/time as expected, but it still only had 25 unlocked pieces instead of 57.

After deleting the Mac version of the game (Steam -> delete local content, manual deletion of ~/Library/Preferences/Braid and deleted the Braid folder) and re-installing it, I now had a empty game with 0 pieces in slot 1 instead of the 25-piece game that was there earlier. Slot 3 still had the 25-piece game that was supposed to be the 57-piece one, dated with today's date.

Is there any way I can force Braid to sync my 56- and 57-piece saves to Steam Cloud correctly so that I don't need to re-play half of the game on Mac?

[Jonathan Blow]

It should always re-sync your stuff after you finish playing.

With regard to the slot 3 saved game that only had some puzzle pieces... is there any pattern to what was missing and what was there (were they only puzzle pieces in certain worlds, or something like that?)

The stuff about time played and your most recent achievement is all handled by Steam. The game itself does nothing there, so if those are screwy, it is maybe a sign that Steam is goofing something up, or else stuff doesn't get updated like that when you play in offline mode.

[phatfish]

Just noticed the update get installed for my client. Thanks for the effort adding this Jonathan, even if there are a few bugs.

Just goes to show that something apparently simple to us mere players can be a pain in the a*se ;)

[RSkin]

Yeah, no kidding. A big thank you to Jonathan for checking this out, and if you need anything more for diagnosis, let me know.

[Jonathan Blow]

The main problem has been that it's just difficult to test this kind of thing extensively without putting it out there.

We have fixed a bunch of problems but there is still at least one known problem... will post here when we expect that everything is fixed.

[Mullins1060]

I am having a little problem with the steam mac version of the game.

I managed to launch the game once but when I realised my save game hadn't ported across correctly from my windows pc. I closed the game and deleted the ~/Library/Preferences/Braid folder.

I launched the game on my windows pc moved around a bit and quit the game synced with steam cloud.

I tried launching the game again on my mac but nothing happens, no launcher pops up, just nothing.

I think it may be because I deleted the ~/Library/Preferences/Braid folder so there is now no config file for the game.

I even tried deleting the game files through steam and redownloading but that hasnt solved it either.

Please help :(

[Jonathan Blow]

We've just put live a fix that ought to improve saved game behavior on the Mac...

The inability to launch was a different bug that should now also be fixed.

[icculus]

Btw, for those that got damaged save games in the initial round of Steam Cloud support: please email them to me, and I'll fix them up by hand: icculus@icculus.org

(The broken save games were my fault.)

--ryan.

[RSkin]

After committing the Windows save and resolving a Steam conflict, I can confirm that my save games are now perfectly synced, with my perfect saves on both Mac & Windows with no odd behaviour. Just wanted to say thank you. You are awesome. :)