AGS: Saves don't take account of game versions and may not be interchangeable

[LukasThyWalls]

Hello.

Urban Witch Story ​https://postmodernadventures.itch.io/urban-witch-story It's an AGS game which looks like an AGI game (but It's not) and wasn't update since March 2023 (More than one and half years since this report), and It's detected and beatable through ScummVM. But It has two versions: The Windows one which is the 1.4 and the Linux one which is 1.3 (both say that right in the title screen).

​ScummVM is detecting them like this:

GAME_ENTRY("urbanwitchstory", "Urban Witch Story.exe", "636950f50c877767bca7e2b1250632f7", 441430956),  //Eng-Esp Win
GAME_ENTRY("urbanwitchstory", "Urban Witch Story.ags", "92f7e6a4ffe81d40c1f20eb68dcb5ae7", 346573336),  //Eng-Esp Win 1.4
GAME_ENTRY("urbanwitchstory", "Urban Witch Story.ags", "ea3bede3ffc8904199e915274feddfe6", 438411774),  //Eng-Esp Lin

So, the issue is that you can't use the saves from 1.3 in 1.4 or the opposite. As both of them are detected with the same ID, the saves became mixed between the versions and you need to manually change that to avoid the issue (that's what happened to me, I didn't figure it out that they are two different versions of the game instead of two ports of the same game version until I found the issue when I was trying to play each one in different computers with the save cloud enabled).

The point of this report is to change the detection to reflect that, something like this or similar:

GAME_ENTRY("urbanwitchstory", "Urban Witch Story.exe", "636950f50c877767bca7e2b1250632f7", 441430956),  //Eng-Esp Win
GAME_ENTRY("urbanwitchstory14", "Urban Witch Story.ags", "92f7e6a4ffe81d40c1f20eb68dcb5ae7", 346573336),  //Eng-Esp Win 1.4
GAME_ENTRY("urbanwitchstory13", "Urban Witch Story.ags", "ea3bede3ffc8904199e915274feddfe6", 438411774),  //Eng-Esp Lin 1.3

Thanks in advance.

[tag2015]

Hi, thanks for the report.
Yes, in general when a new version of a game is released (or in this case there are two different versions) the gameid stays the same and in AGS sometimes the saves aren't interchangeable.

This happens for example for MAGS games that get re-released or bugfixed after the competition, you can easily find both versions but most of the time you can't interchange the saves.
Creating individual gameids for each version feels quite overwhelming considering the number of AGS games, maybe we can use an extra flag for the version and automatically append it to the save if present but that too would require checking lots of entries.

Moving this to feature requests

[LukasThyWalls]

Sorry! I can swear that other games did that already. Like non-AGS games what are not as populate as are known or commercial games and they do that, but I was thinking in Maniac Mansion Deluxe (AGS Fangame) and I thought that It was separated by version automatically...

​But I was wrong.

What happens is I do that by default. In fact I have installed Maniac Mansion Deluxe 1.0 and 1.4 and they IDs are maniacmansiondeluxe10 and maniacmansiondeluxe14... because some time ago I tested both versions because detection issues (#13482) and I put them in that way instead the default maniacmansiondeluxe and maniacmansiondeluxe-1 to have them more self-explanatory.

So, yeah, sorry, It's a feature request, not a defect.

I don't know If it can be possible to detect a version automatically when adding the game (It looks like to me a little hard because It's needed to add something new to do that in that phase) but that can avoid issues like I said, with the savegames and cloud sharing.

Also, some fan translations can be tricky too to this as they work weirdly (#13480), but that's other topic and maybe they should be detected and named accordingly.

Only to point it out, in my case, I use as pattern <ID Game><version>-<language> similar what I saw in some already detected games, only using <version> and <language> if there are several versions and they are needed. For example, I can Game10, Game14 or Game14-es, which are Game 1.0, Game 1.4 and Game 1.4 in Spanish respectively (the other normally are in English as they are the original games and the Spanish one normally is with a fan translation, by the way, in the past I used Game-es_t for games with fan translations, but I don't do that anymore).

Anyway, sorry and thanks!