Hi all, thanks for any assistance. Title pretty much sums it up, lost all data. I am on a macOS 26.1. Played yesterday with no issues, launched stable today via YARC Launcher and got the first-time popup and quickly realized the game was detecting its first run and all data is missing. In between my last play and now, I have forked the Git repo on this machine to a new folder in my user folder. I am a .NET developer professionally and was considering contributing, so I assume this has something to do with the issue, and I am making a silly user error (I am relatively new to macOS and have never developed on it). I got as far as running a debug build within Unity (another piece of software I am unfamiliar with), so my instincts are that that build overwrote my stable game data. I am hoping that is not the case and would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you!
#MacOS: Setting up dev environment deletes YARG data
bold wraith
Small update as I troubleshoot this, I have found the YARG installs folder and have found 2 folders, one of which was last modified before I cloned the repo. I'm now hopeful that is my original savedata and I just need to fix some pathing.
False alarm, that second folder is the Nightly Build instance.
fiery cove
the game saves your data in separate folders for each of development, nightly, and stable builds, so running in the editor (or a build created from the "make test build" option in the editor) will use the dev folder. Data from the stable releases always goes in the release folder and nightly uses nightly. (creative!)
bold wraith
Thank you for the reply! That's encouraging news, so it sounds like I need to just tell the YARC launcher to launch the correct instance?
I do see the dev, nightly, and release folders, as well
fiery cove
if you made a build from unity's build menu, it would have built as a stable build, but it shouldn't have actually overwritten any of your data, though sometimes when dev diverges sufficiently from stable it might cause some difficulty reading profiles/settings/etc depending on what has changed, if the build wrote new versions of the files
the good news is that the scores are saved in a sqlite database that should work fine with any version, so even if you can't unfuck your profile data, you can just create new profiles and change the UUIDs to their old values and the game will be able to find old scores
that being said, profiles are stored separately from game settings, so it is possible to accidentally overwrite the settings json without actually impacting your profile data or anything else
(the anti-piracy popup state is saved in global settings, it's not a per-profile thing)
bold wraith
Ok, that all makes perfect sense so far. Yeah all the settings.json files I'm seeing have recent timestamps, so I'll remake the profiles and do calibration etc. Hopefully I can get scores back but honestly not the end of the world.
This is all fantastic background btw, thank you a ton already
fiery cove
unless you went and manually added a new instance of YARG to the launcher, it should be the same install. Did you happen to add any command line arguments to the launcher? One of them makes YARG store its data somewhere other than the default...
bold wraith
Nope, no changes to command line params
fiery cove
(edited paths due to a small lie, lol)
bold wraith
lol noted. Ok so what are my next steps so attempt recovery?
fiery cove
first thing, make a copy of the release folder so that you have a backup of whatever still exists
second, check the profiles subfolder and see if there is data in profiles.json and bindings.json for whatever profiles you previously set up
fiery cove
the game may have automatically created a new profile on launch depending on what devices you had connected, but they're always named "New <instrument> Profile", so it should be easy to distinguish from anything you created yourself
(there's also a timestamp noting when the profile was last used, IIRC)
if those are there, you just lost your settings file somehow and you'll just need to recreate whatever changes you had made in settings, but the profiles should show up in the profiles menu able to be connected
bold wraith
Both those JSONs are empty under the release folder, bummer
fiery cove
Check to see if the scores.db sqlite database has anything in it
If not either something nuked the whole release folder or you're somehow looking in the wrong place
bold wraith
the db is harder to inspect but it's only 45kb, seems small
I am looking in /Users/smapti/Library/Application Support/YARC/YARG/release/
fiery cove
hm, yeah, that is just about the size of a fresh scores.db (windows reports 44kb)
bold wraith
yikes, not looking good lol
fiery cove
you're sure you never had anything in the additional launch arguments box in the launcher?
(and, though this sounds stupid, that you were actually playing stable before and not nightly?)
bold wraith
nothing that I manually put there, definitely. And yup, 100% playing stable.
I did run some CLIs during my dev env setup that are a mystery to me, all from YARG's GitHub readme
fiery cove
none of that touches the profile folders, it's all stuff to do with the cloned source tree and git settings :/
bold wraith
yeah I figured as much, just being thorough
fiery cove
I'm having a difficult time imagining what might have wiped the profile data, but if there is some kind of bug I'd really like to find it for obvious reasons...I'm guessing your logs folder is also empty?
bold wraith
let's see
fiery cove
(or only has logs from the launch after the release folder disappeared)
If you haven't run the game except the one time since the folder went away, the unity Player-prev.log should be around somewhere and have anything that was logged from the last time you played
bold wraith
Yup, 4 logs, none with any history older an hour or so
fiery cove
post the first one if you don't mind
I doubt there's anything useful, but it never hurts to check
bold wraith
fiery cove
I suspect the one before that would be the one that had useful information 🙁
bold wraith
If you haven't run the game except the one time since the folder went away, the ...
I did run it a couple of times on my initial troubleshooting :/
fiery cove
yeah, unfortunately that's a perfectly normal "I'm being run for the first time" log 🙁
bold wraith
Anything in Unity to check? I am entirely new to that ecosystem so no real instincts there
fiery cove
no, the built players are completely independent from the editor
just in case, I'd suggest using whatever search tools are available on MacOS to see if it was somehow putting the data folder somewhere else previously (maybe look for currentSong.json since that name is less likely to be used by other programs)
bold wraith
That's a good idea, I'll try that and then call it
No dice. But all good, if I can't get the high score again it was a fluke anyway right 😉 Really appreciate your time! I learned a ton so it wasted wasted, and I'll leave this up in case it can help in the future.
I'll def be backing up that release folder periodically, so this may save my butt in the future. The hard lessons stick the best don't they lol
fiery cove
Sorry to hear that.. this kind of thing is no good for anybody....
bold wraith
Oh man, it's v0.14, this kind of thing is to be expected, no big deal at all. I'm taking the lesson learned as a positive. Thanks again for your efforts, lmk if I can help track the bug down in any way.
sonic field
I wonder if making a build and then running it overwrites previous save data
rocky sluice
Just wanted to chime in that I had the same issue - same OS, set up development environment and my next play of stable was like a clean install
fiery cove
I wonder if installing the editor is somehow causing the data directory to get deleted
MacOS: Setting up dev environment deletes YARG data
or maybe it happens when you try to enter play mode in the editor...
rocky sluice
Circling back: YARG was still messed up for me - the new profiles I made didn't retain the instruments and keybinds. So I did a clean uninstall of Unity. I also trashed YARG and YARC (did not use the uninstall option in YARC) and reinstalled. All my old profiles and music library re-appeared and worked when I launched YARG. I really don't want to try to repro now that it's working again, but it seems like the data directory didn't get deleted or overwritten.