Deleting the game does not delete the game.

WarpZone32 · February 2017

WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK!?

I hear all these people talking about how, "Oh, it's fixed in experimental. It's fixed in experimental." So I COMPLETELY delete Subnautica in the Steam menu. It says Subnautica now takes up 0 bytes of space on my hard drive. Anything from the old install that could POSSIBLY corrupt the new install is now gone, right?

So I download experimental... that's an hour of my life I'll never get back... and boot it up.

ALL my saved games are still here!

How the fuck am I supposed to make a clean start and test the new, supposedly fixed version, if I've still got old data sitting around potentially corrupting my new saves EVEN IF I LITERALLY DELETE EVERYTHING!?

0x6A7232 · February 2017

Either Steam backs up your saves (can anyone confirm this?) or you've got files locked on your hard disk. See my topic here: http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/146729/just-checking-on-something-weird-ive-noticed-all-help-appreciated/p1

Apparently for absolutely no reason, igfxEM.exe would lock files in my saved games folder, even if I never loaded Subnautica. I'm guessing something with Steam? Really confusing. Anyways, do you have anything locking files in your \SavedGames\ folder?

The solution I used whenever that happened was to restart igfxEM, and it would release the Subnautica files.

If it was Steam backing up your saves and automatically restoring them, then just delete the contents of your \SavedGames folder and you should be good to go.

WarpZone32 · February 2017

I just deleted the damned SavedGames folder. So far it feels like a step in the right direction, though it still chugs like before when the Precursor Gun is anywhere near visible. Frequently Wrecks would just disappear on me the moment I turned my back on them, sometimes even leaving behind duplicate loot. Not sane behavior for a monolithic hunk of dead metal by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it's less horribly unplayable than before. (Again, until you get on the Mountain Island and start making right turns in the caves while dodging 30 crawlers at a time, then it hangs like a homeboy being lynched from a glider while using google hangouts. It stutters like Porky Pig noticing Capser the Firendly Ghost while doing a Jerry Lewis impression. There's more pop-in than a soda's father recovering his HP and MP in a JRPG. More lag than a... than a... I got nothing. There's LAG okay?

Still. It didn't crash so far, and I only had to cut each door once, so it's a step in the right direction.

So far, I give this version (Experimental Build Feb 32013 44104) 7 out of 10 unnecessarily adversarial bug reports. Would scream at my computer again.

Whenever I play next, I'll be building a PRAWN, tackling the Blood Kelp Zone, and seeing if I can set up a proper base in the Brine river valley.

0x6A7232 · February 2017

Most lag problems when playing on a fresh save are caused by disk I/O bottleneck. If you don't have an SSD, and don't plan on getting one, perhaps you could get a flash drive just for Subnautica? Should be able to get a good fast drive for around $20

Bonus being you can transfer Subnautica off temporarily to use it to install Windows, and other than that, you can of course use it as a normal flash drive even with Subnautica installed to it.

Just disable Steam auto-updates so it won't freak if the drive is disconnected.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-of-the-fastest-usb-3-0-flash-drives-you-should-buy/

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-usb-3-0-thumb-drive/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-3.0-thumb-drive-review,3477.html

WarpZone32 · February 2017

You CAN'T disable auto-updates. The only options Steam gives you are "Always keep this up to date," "Only update this game when I launch it" or "Hi-priority- Update this game before others."

0x6A7232 · February 2017

Nice. Umm, well then your only option would be to "re-install" the game to the flash drive if Steam freaks out and thinks it's not there -- it will re-download only what's needed as it checks the destination directory for files that are already downloaded.

Bummer about the lack of options, though. I researched it and apparently there's no way to stop Steam from updating games, unfortunately.

One possible solution would be to install Subnautica to the hard disk, then just copy it to the flash drive and run it manually from there. Not sure if that would work, but if so, you should be in the clear as Steam will only update the hard disk installation.

Then, you could clear the SavedGames folder on the hard disk, and whenever you wanted to update the flash drive, just copy the contents of the Steam installation on the HDD to the USB, overwriting everything there (your saved games wouldn't be affected as you've cleared the HDD SavedGames folder).

Unsure if that would work, but it's worth a shot.

WarpZone32 · February 2017

I think I'll just stick to my standing policy of putting up with the lag and publicly ripping Unknown Worlds a new one when it gets too bad/crashes the game. That seems to be the only thing that gets them to stop implementing features and start working on bugfixes.

If this is a common enough problem that you had to figure out hackish solutions to it, maybe a better idea would be for UW to use a smaller bus/lower resolution world data for some users, dependent on hardware/performance?

Fathom · February 2017

Isn't it pretty normal that your save files and sometimes your game settings are not deleted when you uninstall a game?

WarpZone32 · February 2017

I have no idea. I've never had to do this with any other game, even building games in Early Access. It's not like the saved game files were stored outside the Steam directory or anything, so where did they go when Subnautica was taking up "0 bytes?" Valve's servers? Are our saved games all "on the cloud" now whether we like it or not? Is that why the reinstall took forever?

No wait, that can't be it, my saves take up 8 gigs. NOBODY would voluntarily host that kinda mess on their own servers for every single user. It's burning money!

Myrm · February 2017

How are you uninstalling/deleting the game. Do you just go to your SN folder and delete it or are you using the correct uninstall method via the Steam console? Once you've uninstalled it, do you go back to the Steam games folder and delete any left overs? I

ant_fio · February 2017

Can confirm, deleting the save in the game's main menu leaves a mostly-empty folder behind. Sometimes a not-so-empty folder, I've noticed. Not sure why it leaves those behind. I've just been deleting what gets left over.

0x6A7232 · February 2017

ant_fio wrote: »

Can confirm, deleting the save in the game's main menu leaves a mostly-empty folder behind. Sometimes a not-so-empty folder, I've noticed. Not sure why it leaves those behind. I've just been deleting what gets left over.

No permission denied or file in use issues?

ant_fio · February 2017

Nothing overt, such as a UAC pop-up or a warning to run in Administrator mode; the files themselves are on my SSD which is unanimously devoted to Steam, though I had witnessed the behavior in a previous installation on a hybrid drive, so I presume drive-types are irrelevant. The folders were bare, for the most part.

All for the exception of one; I had carried a save file from previous versions of the game unwittingly, which I noticed in file explorer after purging all of my saves. It seemed to contain some of its cache/compiled folders, the contents of which I did not scrutinize; it must have been able to delete something for the newer save files to be almost, but not entirely, empty. Of the folders it left behind, only one contained any semblance of the game's file tree. The rest were pretty much empty.

File-in-use, perhaps, though it gave no indication; no explicit errors to speak of. The drive and contained Steam-folder shouldn't have any atypical permission changes; nothing by hand apart from what Steam might normally do to an installation directory, to the best of my knowledge.

WarpZone32 · February 2017

I right clicked Subnautica in Steam and told it to uninstall. I did not manually delete files in the operating system, nor did I launch the game and manually delete the saved games before uninstalling.

After uninstalling and reinstalling and seeing that the saved games were still there, I manually deleted the SavedGames folder and created a new empty folder named SavedGames. That seemed to work. My first new saved game seemed pretty stable up until the Grand Reef wreck, then it gradually started getting bad again. Only one crash so far. Duplicate doors/wrecks have been replaced by disappearing wrecks, some of which I didn't even get a chance to loot first.

Deleting the game does not delete the game.

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