Others Flexible Survival [v2024-11-05] [Nuku Valentines]

[fat_fingers_ma_gee]

Is there any good source on what content is where and how to reach it? From an outside perspective, this game is confusing as hell, in no small part due to the format of the engine, and since many people say the wiki is outdated and unreliable, it would be good to know if there are alternatives.

or at least get a most current save that can be altered on whatever platform that is current. Maybe?

I just think it's too much work to try and alter a save that has to be changed multiple times for it to work.

 

[Anotherdude69]

Haven't played in years. Savewords were still a thing when I did. Is there a save editor that still works? Or at least something to help me know what to do when editing directly with notepad? I can't tell whats what with the hundreds of numbers I see.

 

[nackedsnake]

or at least get a most current save that can be altered on whatever platform that is current. Maybe?

I just think it's too much work to try and alter a save that has to be changed multiple times for it to work.

Really miss the old days when you can play around "save words". Guess the structure is too complicated to having a working save editor? Since they are changing Engines I'm betting it'll be more user friendly.

Recently I'm just using "IwannaCheat" to see around and not doing serious playthru.

since many people say the wiki is outdated and unreliable, it would be good to know if there are alternatives.

The wiki is outdated, but it's reliable afaik. And you know, it's fan's passion free labour, you can't really complain about it.

 

[Shilou]

Is there any good source on what content is where and how to reach it? From an outside perspective, this game is confusing as hell, in no small part due to the format of the engine, and since many people say the wiki is outdated and unreliable, it would be good to know if there are alternatives.

Besides the wiki (still good information there), I've either searched this thread, or gone through the

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to determine what I need to do for some quests. I click the Search field and then only In this repository. Has helped a lot so far.

Haven't played in years. Savewords were still a thing when I did. Is there a save editor that still works? Or at least something to help me know what to do when editing directly with notepad? I can't tell whats what with the hundreds of numbers I see.

I found this

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sifting through this thread. It hasn't been updated since 2020, but does help to open the FS exported glkdata files and read what the values mean.

 

[Sarkath]

It hasn't been updated since 2020, but does help to open the FS exported glkdata files and read what the values mean.

I was planning to update it to describe each of the fields, removing the need to reference the game's source, but I held off when the Godot port was announced. The save format won't carry over, after all.

I might start working on it again, though, as it's likely that the Godot port is going to take a while to reach a playable state. We'll see.

As it stands now, though, barring bugs and FS making use of new data types (unlikely), the current version of Flexible Editor will work for all future Inform versions of FS since all it's doing is decoding and providing a way to edit the raw files.

 

[Shilou]

I was planning to update it to describe each of the fields, removing the need to reference the game's source, but I held off when the Godot port was announced. The save format won't carry over, after all.

I might start working on it again, though, as it's likely that the Godot port is going to take a while to reach a playable state. We'll see.

As it stands now, though, barring bugs and FS making use of new data types (unlikely), the current version of Flexible Editor will work for all future Inform versions of FS since all it's doing is decoding and providing a way to edit the raw files.

Ahh, I never correlated you to the creator of it. No worries and no pressure. It works great as is and you did an amazing job with it! Kudos to you for creating the editor as it is now. It's helped a lot to edit my character. :3

It'll be interesting to see how the Godot port will be, and how long, but hopeful it'll work out.

 

[Sarkath]

Ahh, I never correlated you to the creator of it. No worries and no pressure. It works great as is and you did an amazing job with it! Kudos to you for creating the editor as it is now. It's helped a lot to edit my character. :3

Thank you for the kind words! Glad to hear that it helped. <3

It'll be interesting to see how the Godot port will be, and how long, but hopeful it'll work out.

From what little I've seen it looks like they're doing what they can to get the basics right. Still, fingers crossed! It's never easy to pick up 10+ years of work and migrate it to a different platform.

 

[NightbookOwl]

Anyone know how to transfer the Player Character level, stats, and equipment when starting a new playthrough?

 

[Sarkath]

Anyone know how to transfer the Player Character level, stats, and equipment when starting a new playthrough?

First, load up your saved game using the previous version. Type "export progress", hit ENTER, then answer "yes" or "y" at the prompt. This will create a bunch of glkdata files (22, as of the current version) in the directory that your Flexible Survival.gblorb file is stored in.

Next, you'll want to download the new version. You can either overwrite the existing version or drop it in a new directory. Either way, make sure that those glkdata files are in the same directory as the gblorb file. Now, load the new version in your interpreter (Git, Gargoyle, etc), start a new game with any settings (they'll all get overwritten with your old data). After the game starts, type "import progress", hit ENTER, then answer "yes" or "y" at the prompt. This will take significantly longer than exporting your progress, but when it's done the world should more or less be as it was.

If you already overwrote the old version,

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.

(Speaking of which, if anyone has any versions that I'm missing, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could send them to me. Thanks! )

 

[ara1111]

I don't get if this exporting thing is even working. It will just save its saving this that and the other, but it never ends. It gives no indication if its done. If I open flexible survivals file location, there's no exports there, so you'd think no. But if I open flexible survival then load game, which opens the exact same place, the exports are there.
Its really weird.
There's no reason it should be making semi-invisible files.

 

[NightbookOwl]

First, load up your saved game using the previous version. Type "export progress", hit ENTER, then answer "yes" or "y" at the prompt. This will create a bunch of glkdata files (22, as of the current version) in the directory that your Flexible Survival.gblorb file is stored in.

Next, you'll want to download the new version. You can either overwrite the existing version or drop it in a new directory. Either way, make sure that those glkdata files are in the same directory as the gblorb file. Now, load the new version in your interpreter (Git, Gargoyle, etc), start a new game with any settings (they'll all get overwritten with your old data). After the game starts, type "import progress", hit ENTER, then answer "yes" or "y" at the prompt. This will take significantly longer than exporting your progress, but when it's done the world should more or less be as it was.

If you already overwrote the old version,

You must be registered to see the links

.

(Speaking of which, if anyone has any versions that I'm missing, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could send them to me. Thanks! )

I mean like when you start a new game. Everything else is completely new again including companions and events. The only thing that I want to transfer when starting a new game is my character's stats and level.

As whenever I important my progress when starting a new game. It loads the entire world that my character was previously in along with the companions and location of whoever I exported my progress.

I'm just wondering if it was possible to just only transfer lvls, stats, and feat. And not the entire world/progress that my character already went through.

 

[Sarkath]

I mean like when you start a new game. Everything else is completely new again including companions and events. The only thing that I want to transfer when starting a new game is my character's stats and level.

As whenever I important my progress when starting a new game. It loads the entire world that my character was previously in along with the companions and location of whoever I exported my progress.

I'm just wondering if it was possible to just only transfer lvls, stats, and feat. And not the entire world/progress that my character already went through.

Oh, I see! You're basically looking for something like New Game+. It's possible, but it does require some manual work. I did it for one of my characters and it took about 15 minutes, including some research.

What you have to do is export the data from your old save game using "export progress." After the process finishes, move the resulting glkdata files into a separate directory (let's call it "OldExport"). Next, you'll want to start a new game and configure it with your desired options. When you start out in the bunker, do "export progress" on the new game. You can just leave those files in place.

Next, download

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. This is what you'll use to merge your old player data into the new file. It's not an installer or anything like that, so just unzip it anywhere. After you do this, run it twice to bring up two instances of it. In the first one, open up OldExports\FSCharacterVariable3Save.glkdata, and in the second one open up FSCharacterVariable3Save.glkdata (the one for the new game, in the directory with FS.

Look for the line that says "yourself" (it should be row 10 on both files). This stores all of your stats. What you want to do is make it so that columns 2-48 are carried over from the old file to the new one (if you want to include information about how your character lost their virginity and in what ways, copy over 49-52 and 66-69 as well). To edit the cells in the new file, click on the target cell, fill in the data, and rinse and repeat. You can use tab and shift-tab, as well as the arrow keys, to move between adjacent cells. Save the file after you've finished this.

Next, load up both FSPlayerListsSave.glkdata files. The old one will have all of your vials (if you played using the Researcher game type), feats, and all of the species that you've encountered. Do the same with the feats (and vials, should you want to carry those over and both of your games are Researcher). To add a new line, click the last, blank line in the list and start typing. After you've migrated everything over, save the new file.

The next file is FSPlayerSave.glkdata. This contains transformation/descriptive data about your character. You can safely copy the file from OldExport into the main directory for this one.

Finally, if you wish to bring your old inventory over, copy FSPossessionSave.glkdata from OldExport into the main directory. Otherwise, your character will start with the default inventory.

After all this is done, load up FS, start a new game with any settings (they'll get overwritten), type "import progress" and then "yes", then cross your fingers. If everything went well you'll be in a new game with your old character within a few minutes.

 

[Sarkath]

I just released

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. It's probably not a critical update for most people, but if you happen to use international characters in your name it'll prevent them from getting stripped out during load and save (before it used 7-bit ASCII character encoding…now it uses 8-bit Windows-1252/Latin1).

I'm not sure how Glk/Git handles non-western regions and I'm not particularly willing to change my Windows install to «insert region here» to test it, so if anyone uses a different native character set, I'd greatly appreciate any testing/feedback.

I didn't bother announcing 1.0.2 yesterday because it was such a minor release, but that version fixes a very minor crash bug caused by FE's improper handling of null values in the first row of data. In practice this only affected FSNewPlayerSave (which doesn't seem to really have any useful gameplay data), but a crash is a crash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This fix is, of course, present in 1.0.3.

 

[Furmilk]

Sorry but, how do you run this? I downloaded the game, and realized it was a very non-standard type. Found out it needs something called git, which I went and installed. When I try to run it with git, it pulls up the cmd and says it can't run this.

The exact wording is "C:\Program is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file". I'll admit to not being tech savvy enough to know wtf is going on here. Why does it sound like it's trying to run the C drive?

I noticed there was a second Git type installed, something bash so I tried that too. It says, "cannot execute binary file
/usr/bin/bash: Exit 126."

 

[Sarkath]

Sorry but, how do you run this? I downloaded the game, and realized it was a very non-standard type. Found out it needs something called git, which I went and installed. When I try to run it with git, it pulls up the cmd and says it can't run this.

That's the wrong Git. Unfortunately, there are two programs named the same thing, one being the interpreter for this game and the other, significantly more popular, one being a development tool (and it sounds like you grabbed the latter).

Feel free to uninstall the Git that you grabbed, as it's not needed for the game to run. After doing that, head over to

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and grab the installer. That will install both the correct flavor of Windows Git and the game itself. The installer used to be provided here, but for some reason it was changed to the raw gblorb file instead. :/

 

[BubbaNoName]

flexible editor works fine. you have to export your progress then use flexibleeditor on one of the files created (there are several) and save the changes. Then importing the file again (which will take 10 to 20 minutes for some reason)

Thats how i managed to enter the lupine lair, by making the hidden rock cavern entrance a public place instead o a private one -.-

Question: How do you get FlexEdit to load the files to edit? I exported my save, have all of my .glkdata files in the same directory as my .gblorb file and pointed FlexEdit to the directory... and get "Cannot load one or more saveword files. Please make sure all 5 .glkdata files are present in the chosen folder"

 

[Sarkath]

Question: How do you get FlexEdit to load the files to edit? I exported my save, have all of my .glkdata files in the same directory as my .gblorb file and pointed FlexEdit to the directory... and get "Cannot load one or more saveword files. Please make sure all 5 .glkdata files are present in the chosen folder"

Sounds like you probably have the wrong editor. FS has used more than 5 glkdata files for quite a while and it no longer uses savewords.

Furkoi is referring to

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. It's a bit barebones in that it only gives you an Excel-like view of the file without explaining what anything is.

Odds are if you're editing your save the file you're interested in is going to be FSCharacterVariablesSave3.glkdata. That lets you edit your base stats. When you open that in Flexible Editor, here's what each of the numbered columns represent:

Spoiler: Big List O.o

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If you want to edit the number of freecreds you have, open FSNumberSave.glkdata. Find "freecred" in column 0 and edit the value in column 1.

 

[mrttao]

huh. this game is actually alive? i started following it in 2011 and i thought it died in 2014.
unexpectedly it is still being worked on in 2022.

 

[Deleted member 2261700]

Sounds like you probably have the wrong editor. FS has used more than 5 glkdata files for quite a while and it no longer uses savewords.

Furkoi is referring to

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. It's a bit barebones in that it only gives you an Excel-like view of the file without explaining what anything is.

been meaning to ask if the mega is the most current version because im shocked and awe'd

291.4 MB from the last 361.0 MB SIZE - my last touch of this game was 2021-10-12

 

[Sarkath]

been meaning to ask if the mega is the most current version because im shocked and awe'd

I just compared it to the version on the FS blog and yep, the MEGA link is up to date.