Campaign not saving

[Trenloe]

Maybe you guys should consider putting a "Save Campaign" button into the software rather than only trusting the software will save on exit when its too late for users to do anything about it at that point and everything is potentially lost.

Type /save in the chat window to force a save.

However, if there is an underlying rights issue with the file access to where the campaign is saved this won't make much difference as this won't work either as it uses the same mechanism that is used when exiting. In addition, FG saves the campaign automatically every 5 minutes - not just on exit.

[damned]

Out of nowhere, this frustrating problem reared its head for me as well. I downloaded and installed FG direct from here, not steam. Have an active Ultimate license (v3.1.4), and my campaigns save to C:/Program Data, not a cloud drive. Using Windows 10 Home.

From install two weeks ago until today, everything worked fine. No issues with the software saving the campaign on close. But today I just spent two hours with a new player creating a character and closed the program. Nothing saved. Work and time wasted. I tested minor changes and looked at the campaign files' timestamps and confirmed *none* of them were updating when exiting FG.

I find this forum post and try executing as admin. That seems to have solved the problem.

It's really confusing why everything worked fine for weeks without executing FG as an administrator up until now, and suddenly now it requires it to save my campaign properly.

There have been many posts of people who's campaigns dont save - and they have been related to permissions. This behaviour where it did work and then after some period of time stops working is new or hasnt been reported (afaik) before. Modern operating systems are more and more security conscious and often do not obviously tell you what they are doing in regards to security. Fantasy Grounds cant adjust the security settings on your computer and there are an almost infinite number of combinations of software and settings that each person has that make having a foolproof system pretty darn difficult.

Now I'm paranoid that it will fail even with admin privs after a long 5-6 hour session. Maybe you guys should consider putting a "Save Campaign" button into the software rather than only trusting the software will save on exit when its too late for users to do anything about it at that point and everything is potentially lost.

As Trenloe points out teh system saves every 5mins and on exit. At least - it processes the save routine - it doesnt at this time check that that it can actually save.

[dulux-oz]

Maybe you guys should consider putting a "Save Campaign" button into the software rather than only trusting the software will save on exit when its too late for users to do anything about it at that point and everything is potentially lost.

You can always type "/save" into the Chatbox to force a save (as I've pointed out in the Tutorial Videos)

Cheers

[Mask_of_winter]

You can always type "/save" into the Chatbox to force a save (as I've pointed out in the Tutorial Videos)

Cheers

Yep. And before you hit enter you can drag the text to a hotkey box. Now you have an almighty Save button!

[Andraax]

Microsoft pushed a patch for Win10 that screwed up permissions on many computers.

[stucco33]

I just got this problem on Windows 7. A pretty fresh campaign (made about a week ago) became unable to save reliably. My test was:
Launch (via Steam)
Load campaign
Open PC panel
Rename a PC with some new addition to remind me what I was trying at the time
Use R-click to exit program entirely
Launch again to see if PC name change stuck

I did this with my week-old campaign and the change only stuck once, and I never found a pattern why. Most of the time the change never stuck.

I started a new campaign. My changes always stuck through several test, with different conditions (launching by exe instead of Steam, not typing /save, etc)

So I am guessing that something in a recent update made saving go bad, but a new campaign made after the update does not have this problem. So it may be quite tricky to bugfix.

Cheers,
Matt

[Trenloe]

@stucco33 - this is more than likely a file access/rights issue. Either FG needs administrator rights to access the files with an issue or there is something blocking access to those files.

1. Are you running any backup/cloud sync software (DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) on your FG data directory? If so, disable this for the FG data directory as it can cause data loss/corruption.
2. Try running FG outside of Steam and run as administrator - right-click on the FG start icon and select "Run as Administrator".

[damned]

also make sure your product is showing as licensed

[stucco33]

@stucco33 - this is more than likely a file access/rights issue. Either FG needs administrator rights to access the files with an issue or there is something blocking access to those files.

1. Are you running any backup/cloud sync software (DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) on your FG data directory? If so, disable this for the FG data directory as it can cause data loss/corruption.
2. Try running FG outside of Steam and run as administrator - right-click on the FG start icon and select "Run as Administrator".

Hi Trenloe, thanks for the reply.

The tl;dr is: launching as administrator does fix the problem, thanks! But I found something that may help you fix it. In short, a campaign can enter a bad state in which it's necessary to launch as admin, while at the same time another campaign has no problems saving, even without the admin launch.

Here are the exact steps I am taking with each campaign, which I will call the "good" campaign and "bad" campaign-- the bad one being the one that does not save. I've worked in software for 20 years so I'll describe this in a suitably anal-retentive way to try to illuminate the problem.

* Launch FG via Steam
* Load campaign
* Highlight campaign and click Start
* See loading screen
* See FG desktop
* Click "PCs" button
* Click a PC character
* Under "Name" label, change the name of the character to something distinctive (such as "test save")
* Click X on the character panel
* Click X on the "Character selection" panel
* In chat window, type and enter the command /save
* Right-click on FG desktop
* Click Exit program
* Click Exit program again
* Repeat above steps with same campaign

On the bad campaign, the change to the character's name *does not remain*-- did this at least 2 times with the exact above steps and many more times with slight variants. Once the name did update but I cannot reproduce it reliably.

With the exact same steps but using the good campaign, the change to the character's name *does remain*-- did this 2 times with the exact above steps and a few more times with slight variants. It never failed to save.

With the same steps but launching directly from the exe with "run as administrator" *the bad campaign then was able to save properly-- this fixed the problem*. The save was successful 2 times out of 2.

But the question remains why, when launching from Steam, one bad campaign had the problem while one good campaign did not. Hopefully this analysis helps you pin down the problem. I can provide the data files if you like.

After this, I went back to launching FG from the exe but not "run as administrator". The bad campaign once again failed to save. So temporarily using the admin launch did not cure the bad campaign.

The bad campaign was one I made about a week ago. It saved several times successfully before it turned bad.

The good campaign was one I made last night.

To answer possible questions brought up earlier:
* Purchased full version of FG (not ultimate). Using 5E ruleset plus purchased monster manual.
* Neither campaign has any special characters-- all letters and numbers
* Windows 7
* FG was recently updated, using the GUI button to update.
* I used to launch exclusively with Steam. Before I noticed the problem, I had started launching directly from the exe to save some time, start multiple instances, etc.

[Trenloe]

Thanks for the detailed info. There's nothing obvious there, especially as you appear to be following the exact same process for each campaign. Are you running any backup/cloud sync software (DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) on your FG data directory?

I had started launching directly from the exe to save some time, start multiple instances, etc.

How many instances are you starting at one time? What are you using them for? For example, 1 x GM and 1 X Player, 2 x GM, etc..