Save games in the cloud

[LaGrange]

Let's say I put the savegame file in the cloud (like Dropbox or Skydrive), install Steam on two machines, point each copy of the game to that savegame, and sometimes continue the game on one machine, and sometimes on the other (but not both at the same time, of course). Would this affect things like achievements and stats in any way? The game doesn't have Steam Cloud, so I thought I'd ask.

[x4000]

Nope, achievements would work just fine.

The one word of advice: if the cloud has locked your file when you are trying to save the game, the game will throw an IO error when saving.  If that happens, don't close your game or your save may be lost.  Just save again and carry on.  That shouldn't happen often at all, but Dropbox has been known to cause that before on occasion in the past with AI War.

[LaGrange]

Thanks! That's great to hear. What about stats? (games won, lost, etc.) I presume that is stored outside of the savegame file on the local hard drive, and therefore wouldn't sync?

[x4000]

Np!

In terms of stats, those are all stored in settings.dat in the runtimedata folder.  Your input bindings are in inputbindings.dat.

[LaGrange]

OK, thanks. I guess I'll sync those manually.

[zespri]

Chris,

you said that for AI War Steam Cloud is not an option because the save are huge. You also said that the Steam Cloud api is really nice and easy to use. Are Bionic Dues saves as big as AI Wars that would prevent them going on Steam Cloud too?

[x4000]

Chris,

you said that for AI War Steam Cloud is not an option because the save are huge. You also said that the Steam Cloud api is really nice and easy to use. Are Bionic Dues saves as big as AI Wars that would prevent them going on Steam Cloud too?

Eh?  I think quite a bit has been lost in translation.  AI War saves aren't that big, all told, although they are also not tiny.  The Valley games are what have absolutely monstrously huge saves.  Depending on when the question was asked, my reference point for "huge" may have been different.

For Steam Cloud, the api is not easy to use at all, from Arcen's perspective.  Mainly that it is in C++ and we are not C++ programmers.  There is a beta of a thing that doesn't require any special code, but it's been in beta for a looooong time now.  When they eventually take that out of beta and make it cross-platform (hopefully), then it should be a very easy thing.

[zespri]

I actually was referring to this http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10603.msg103731.html#msg103731
Now re-reading the old thread I realize that I misunderstood it.
Thank you for the response.

[x4000]

No problem at all.