Posted April 15, 2022
Something had happened 5 years ago and I had lost access to my game saves. I believe the game had crashed real bad at the time.
I'd tried to start over and reach back to the last save point of chapter 2 level 2 (save the wife). I was running Linux with wine and the control was very glitchy and the game would crash from time to time, so it was a very frustrating experience all along, never reaching the next savepoint. Eventually I'd given up then.
Back to present day after 5 years of gap, I decided to try it again. After checking the savegame directory, and running the game from a clean WINEPREFIX (I still had the savegame directory saved somewhere and restored it), I finally found the solution to the lost saves!
If you try to create a player ID, and if the ID exists as a directory in savegame, the game won't do anything if you press Enter (no error message, nothing!). To solve this problem, I had to rename savegame/${ID} (where ${ID} is my original player ID) to something else, restart the game, create the player ID with my original ${ID}, quit, then revert back the savegame/${ID} directory renamed earlier.
Another problem I encountered was that it still wouldn't show the saved progress from savegame/${ID}.
I eventually found out there is a registry entry that forces the game to use a different savegame directory instead of savegame/${ID}: In registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/PlanetMoon/Giants/IDs/${ID}, if SaveIdx exists and has a number, the savegame directory being used is savegame/SaveGame${SaveIdx} (${SaveIdx} is the number set for SaveIdx) instead of savegame/${ID}.
After deleting SaveIdx from the registry and restarting the game, I now have full access to the original savegame of 5 years ago! And it looks like wine has improved quite a bit to make this game playable without crashes and glitches!
Finally, I was able to retrieve the wife without dying in one single long sequence! Now on to carrying her up the mountain, if I can just get through the enemy reinforcement...
I'd tried to start over and reach back to the last save point of chapter 2 level 2 (save the wife). I was running Linux with wine and the control was very glitchy and the game would crash from time to time, so it was a very frustrating experience all along, never reaching the next savepoint. Eventually I'd given up then.
Back to present day after 5 years of gap, I decided to try it again. After checking the savegame directory, and running the game from a clean WINEPREFIX (I still had the savegame directory saved somewhere and restored it), I finally found the solution to the lost saves!
If you try to create a player ID, and if the ID exists as a directory in savegame, the game won't do anything if you press Enter (no error message, nothing!). To solve this problem, I had to rename savegame/${ID} (where ${ID} is my original player ID) to something else, restart the game, create the player ID with my original ${ID}, quit, then revert back the savegame/${ID} directory renamed earlier.
Another problem I encountered was that it still wouldn't show the saved progress from savegame/${ID}.
I eventually found out there is a registry entry that forces the game to use a different savegame directory instead of savegame/${ID}: In registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/PlanetMoon/Giants/IDs/${ID}, if SaveIdx exists and has a number, the savegame directory being used is savegame/SaveGame${SaveIdx} (${SaveIdx} is the number set for SaveIdx) instead of savegame/${ID}.
After deleting SaveIdx from the registry and restarting the game, I now have full access to the original savegame of 5 years ago! And it looks like wine has improved quite a bit to make this game playable without crashes and glitches!
Finally, I was able to retrieve the wife without dying in one single long sequence! Now on to carrying her up the mountain, if I can just get through the enemy reinforcement...
