Deleting the game does not delete the game.
WarpZone32
Join Date: 2016-12-13 Member: 224911Members
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!?
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!?
Comments
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
No permission denied or file in use issues?
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.
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.