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1y
#1
@bastecklein Sorry if I'm bothering you, but how exactly does cloud sync work in MC2? Was it pre-0.19 only or does it update the cloud data file thingy in your account whenever the world is saved? For example, if I opened a world on one device and tried to access it on another, would said world still show up?
Thank you for reading!



(I lost over 30 recycling centers on the backup save)
Living the Spamlandian Dream
1y
#2
The saving in MC2 is sort of a mess right now, and I don't know a clean way to fix it without destroying everyone's progress. The ideal solution really is to have no cloud sync at all.

The original design idea was to have no cloud sync. The problem arises from a bug early on in the code that I did recognize until v0.19.0 where every game was actually not only being synced to the cloud, but saved to the overall player library file. Each player has a library file that is cloud synced that contains the login credentials to every server they play on.

Behind the scenes, whenever you connect to a game, whether it is a local server or a remote one, the server code gives you a key to use to log in, so that other players cannot log in as you. This info was supposed to be cloud synced, but nothing else. Somehow I was saving each game's complete data to the library file as well and idk how I didn't notice it until so late.

So now, every player has every one of their MC2 worlds, as well as login credentials, saved to a single library file. So if you have a lot of cities, it actually takes a really long time to load/save, since you are essentially loading every single city and saving every single city, each time you load/save. The up side is that you can now access all of your games from any device. The downside is that it is one huge file and a single point of failure. It also, as you witnessed, will break things if you try to play on multiple devices.

The problem is, how to undo or break this behavior now, after the fact. Cloud sync is now expected behavior for a lot of players. Also, if the game data is removed from the library file, the next time somebody loads a colony, the game will see that the data is not in the library, and load up the last locally saved backup copy of the city, creating out of sync versions.

So anyway, I am not sure what to do exactly. I might just have to create a server specifically for My Colony 2 and save all colonies individually to the cloud and require online access to play the game. Or remove cloud sync completely and let players deal with the fallout for the next few weeks after the change. Or keep it as-is and see what happens. IDK what's best :-/
Owner of Ape Apps, LLC
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Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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