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Comment by trinovantes | Hacker News Reader

This is a good reminder for me to make a physical backup of my game saves on Steam cloud

"Your save is incompatible to the current version of the game."

Dirt Rally: "Your save is made under different operating system and is thus incompatible"

Imagine a game save that uses OS dependent line breaks as delimiters. I joke but I fear there's some game out there that actually does this.

"Closed-source" and "industry secrets" are holding gamedev back big time. We get away with many practices that'd be considered backwards by a web developer even 10 years ago, and we have no viable solutions to many gamedev-specific problems. This in turn leads to just the same stuff being re-made again and again since like 2005 or so.

I had started playing Skyrim on an XBOX360. A few years later I got it for my pc as well. I was amazed when I found out I could easily extract the save file form the console and use it on the PC version of Skyrim without any issues! Best part is that I was running Skyrim (and the extraction tools) on Linux under wine (this was before proton even).

Game industry is notorious for binary blob game state. I worked at many and where possible converted to a keyed/JSON format that can encrypted if needed or keys and it led to more server based and portable profile/game states. These were hard fought battles.

The best part of JSON or keyed data is less profile conversions for one new key that shifts everything by a set position. Keys can be added and removed and you don't break the entire game save.

Binary blobs for game formats/saves/states is still a massive problem in gamedev. They have given many people a bad time when the profile conversion or state conversion fails and you end up with borked states. Almost impossible for that to happen with a keyed format like JSON. Getting studios to use it, especially early in dev to work with server/mobile dev was a massive challenge.

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