User Profile Missing, any idea why?

[KoalaKing98]

Hey hey everybody,

So last night I spent around 4-5 hours playing the default campaign, and eventually decided to quit, as the sun was beginning to rise. Today, when I went to return to my campaign of carnage, the game opened with its default low-resolution settings and all user profiles (base game profiles, not FAF profiles) were gone. The only issues I've had with the game prior to this was Steam causing First Time Setup on every launch, but this didn't seem to affect anything in-game, and stopped after the third or fourth time launching.

I checked my saves in "../My Games/Gas Powered Games/Supreme Commander Forged Alliance" and they were all still there, my profile and every save I've made within it. I also check "../AppData/Local/Gas Powered Games/Supreme Commander Forged Alliance" and found that it had marked the Game.prefs file as a .BAD, and created a new one. I know this would reset the games graphical settings, but I don't know if it would affect User Profiles. I attempted to remove the new file and restore the old one, but it only re-marked the old file as .BAD and made yet another new copy.

This is all I dug up from my hunting through the files, though I don't know where User Profiles are actually saved, so I couldn't find if the profile was actually deleted or not.

There are no mods installed, nor have I installed any or tampered with the game files up to date. I'm running on Window 7 x64 through Steam, and I wont go through hardware specs just because its a relatively old game as games go these days, and shouldn't have any issue running on any half decent hardware of this era.

Any and all help is appreciated, just hopin' to get back in-game. Even just the profile save location might help, I couldn't find it online anywhere.

Thanks!

[Sheeo]

Something messed up your old prefs file. You should post it here so somebody can check out how it's bad.

[The Mak]

Your user profile is stored in C:\Users\'YOUR USER NAME'\AppData\Local\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\Game.prefs

This sounds like a first setup issue.
Launch FA through the stand alone method either through Steam or the desktop shortcut, if you have one. Note, this not FAF, this is running the stand alone game without FAF.
When you start it, does it ask you to create a user name? If so, go ahead and set one up as well as any settings changes your want.
Start a skirmish match with the AI. After you are in a game, select End Game, NOT Exit to Windows. You want to go back to the main FA menu.
Once at the FA main menu, go ahead and exit to Windows.
Now start FA again though the stand alone method and your setting that you had set before should be there.

If you exit out to windows anywhere in FA except from the main menu, all your changes are lost (settings, campaign progress, last map played, etc.). Since you just jumped straight into a campaign match from a clean install, and then exit right out to windows in the middle or at the end of a game, you never gave a chance for the program to save this information into Game.prefs.

If you did the above steps correctly and you are still having issues, your user account may have restrictions that forbid you access or write privileges to the AppData folder. Try running FA as an Administrator account.

[KoalaKing98]

Your user profile is stored in C:\Users\'YOUR USER NAME'\AppData\Local\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\Game.prefs

This sounds like a first setup issue.
Launch FA through the stand alone method either through Steam or the desktop shortcut, if you have one. Note, this not FAF, this is running the stand alone game without FAF.
When you start it, does it ask you to create a user name? If so, go ahead and set one up as well as any settings changes your want.
Start a skirmish match with the AI. After you are in a game, select End Game, NOT Exit to Windows. You want to go back to the main FA menu.
Once at the FA main menu, go ahead and exit to Windows.
Now start FA again though the stand alone method and your setting that you had set before should be there.

If you exit out to windows anywhere in FA except from the main menu, all your changes are lost (settings, campaign progress, last map played, etc.). Since you just jumped straight into a campaign match from a clean install, and then exit right out to windows in the middle or at the end of a game, you never gave a chance for the program to save this information into Game.prefs.

If you did the above steps correctly and you are still having issues, your user account may have restrictions that forbid you access or write privileges to the AppData folder. Try running FA as an Administrator account.

Aah I see, so this is a known issue? When I was exiting the game before, I would just save in the dropdown menu while the mission was paused, and just close to windows from there, but I had done this at least three times without issue. Do you know if there be a way to possibly link my campaign save files to a new profile? I'd hate to loose what progress I've made.

Thanks for the help!

[The Mak]

You may have saved your campaign game progress, but you did not save any game settings that you changed when you just straight exit to windows.

All saved games are saved per FA user name in this location:

C:\Users\'USER NAME'\Documents\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\savegames\'FA USER NAME'

You may be able to just copy or move those files to another FA user name folder.

You may also have to copy some text in Game.prefs to the new user name. Open Game.prefs with a text editor, like Notepad. Search for campaign = { in Game.prefs from your old user name (you can find it after Name =) and copy all the text in between campaign = { till the brace }, that is lined up with campaign =

example of a new user name with no campaign progress:

Code: Select all

            campaign = {
                [''] = {
                    [''] = {
                        { },
                        { },
                        { },
                        [''] = {
                            allPrimary = false,
                            allSecondary = true
                        }
                    }
                }
            },


Your existing user name will have more text there, copy and replace that part into the new user name.

If all the above is giberish to you, start a new campaign

[KoalaKing98]

You may have saved your campaign game progress, but you did not save any game settings that you changed when you just straight exit to windows.

All saved games are saved per FA user name in this location:

C:\Users\'USER NAME'\Documents\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\savegames\'FA USER NAME'

You may be able to just copy or move those files to another FA user name folder.

You may also have to copy some text in Game.prefs to the new user name. Open Game.prefs with a text editor, like Notepad. Search for campaign = { in Game.prefs from your old user name (you can find it after Name =) and copy all the text in between campaign = { till the brace }, that is lined up with campaign =

example of a new user name with no campaign progress:

Code: Select all

            campaign = {
                [''] = {
                    [''] = {
                        { },
                        { },
                        { },
                        [''] = {
                            allPrimary = false,
                            allSecondary = true
                        }
                    }
                }
            },


Your existing user name will have more text there, copy and replace that part into the new user name.

If all the above is giberish to you, start a new campaign

This is definitely on the right track, and I can tell we're almost there, but there was nothing in Game.prefs similar to the code you mentioned. The new profile didn't have anything to do with the campaign anywhere in it until I started a mission and made a new save, but it gave me this instead:

Code: Select all

CampaignSave = 'Why wont you work',
            layout = 'bottom',
            LoadingFaction = 1
        }
    }
}


at the bottom of a very long list of what seems to be video and control settings, hence all the closed brackets there ("Why wont you work" is the name of the save file). After some experimentation, I found that the "CampaignSave = '[ ]' " will only display the latest save, and the "LoadingFaction = [ ]" seems to go away entirely when I save as a non UEF faction. I also tried to move my old saves into the new profile, and setting the "CampaignSave = '[ ]' " section to the name of the latest of those saves. They all showed up in-game as loadable saves, but upon trying to load one, the game would crash. My suspicion is that the line of code that specifies the missions that the profile is allowed to access as he/she progresses, is saying that I can't access the mission that the save game is trying to load, creating a conflict. After all, how could I have a save in a locked mission. After extensive search of the Game.prefs file, I can't seem to find that line of code. Of course, it could be a completely different problem entirely that I wouldn't be able to predict. Any thoughts?

[The Mak]

Hmm, please post a copy of your Game.prefs file to pastebin.com. Even when I create a new user profile I get that campaign array. I am curious as to what yours looks like.

[KoalaKing98]

Hmm, please post a copy of your Game.prefs file to pastebin.com. Even when I create a new user profile I get that campaign array. I am curious as to what yours looks like.

Here you are, this is the raw contents of the file. Note that this is after making a save file in the campaign for it to show up. If you want one without, I can do that too.

http://pastebin.com/ubEhVevc

[The Mak]

Well, I tried manipulating that campaign array. Played through the first mission and then tried to replicate that for the second mission. The game does not like that. Reset my Game.prefs to default. Luckily I had a backup copy.

So as far as I can see, you will need to restart the campaign. There seems to be no cheating in the campaign, unless you modify the files in CampaignBranch, which is located in mods.scd, which is located in gamedata folder where FA is installed. As always, make backups before you mess around in there.