Parchment interpreter not saving games

Hi all,

I am having trouble saving games across browsing sessions using the Parchment interpreter to play games like Anchorhead. I type “save” and it says “Ok” and if I reload the page, I can start where I left off. However, if I close the browser and reopen it and try to load the game, it just says “Restore failed.” I am glad to have discovered this before getting too far into the game. I really want to play some great IF but I can’t if my progress can’t be saved. Does anyone have the same problem and/or know how to solve it? I am using Chromium 32 on Linux, but I have the same issue on Firefox 24.

Hopefully I am posting to the right subforum. Thanks.

Parchment saves a game to the URL (the part after the #). You’ll need to bookmark the game in order to come back to it.

I usually copy the url and email it to myself so I can continue from wherever machine I’m in.

sadly, iplayif is now in the games category in the proxy back at work. See? Bad things happen when you ditch literature…

Yes, but good things happen when you catch silence. :smiley:

(Silence was one of 4 antonyms I found for literature. Weird!)

Back on topic, I’ve had trouble with restoring Parchment saves by pasting the URL back in. Can you check this? tinyurl.com/kf7q4yj When I paste it into my browser window the “Parchment is loading” screen flashes up and then I get a blank.

(Try preview.tinyurl.com/kf7q4yj to check that the URL is really what it’s supposed to be.)

Yeah, something’s gone wrong and the VM is crashing. Is this the only game that you’ve found that doesn’t work?

It was the first one I checked. (But IIRC I’ve had this trouble sometimes in the past.)

It works for some games, but maybe not all.

Unfortunately I’ve lost some of the interest I had for Parchment, and haven’t spent much time on it this past year at all. I wish there were more people working on it…

Wow, thanks for all the responses.

Hmm, when I posted the topic the URL wasn’t changing when I typed “save”. Now it seems to be working, so apparently the problem solved itself? I’ll check back if it fails again.

I’m having this same issue. I tried playing City of Secrets by Emily short. I’m so very near the ending game and have been dutifully saving. But now it’s saying ‘restore failed’. Can anyone help? I can download the data file of the saves, but they open as blank text edit docs. No idea what to do with them. I should’ve just played through Spatterlight. :frowning:

If when you download the savefile it’s a blank file, then that sounds like the same issue as Dialog stores data very inefficiently in localStorage · Issue #131 · curiousdannii/parchment · GitHub. In short, the browser’s storage gets full, and Parchment hasn’t been smart enough to clear space to make new saves. Have you been using Parchment a lot, and playing lots of games in it? I haven’t yet got around to making it clear out old autosaves, but that would be the most obvious thing to try. It won’t make the failed save exist though. But maybe you have an older save you could use?

Thanks for your reply. Uh, I did literally have 70+ saves in a different, separate Parchment game - another Emily Short game ‘Counterfeit Monkey’. Would saving in another, totally different parchment game affect the save ability in another? If so, that’s wacky. Anyway, before the crash/lost game saves, I’d even gone through and deleted old, unnecessary saves within ‘City of Secrets’, and then was keeping an eye on the current saves progress. They always looked good. So I thought that even if my browser crashed, I could return to them. I guess not.

I wound up download the game using the oddly-named ‘Spatterlight’ software, and its’ playing and (hopefully, fingers crossed) saving just fine now. I have local file saves, so i’m hoping this will keep me going. I’m semi-near where I was the last time all this went down, though much more to go still. Just a bummer that online saves aren’t quite so reliable.
Thanks anyway for your help though - good to know, to be on the safe side for the future!

Save files (and autosaves) are stored in the browser’s localStorage, and most browsers have a limit of only 10MB per domain. IF save files are usually pretty small (though Counterfeit Monkey’s save files are among the biggest), but it can still fill up. I’m working towards changing Parchment to use the new IndexedDB API which has much larger limits, but switching to it takes a lot of work.

To be clear, if Parchment fails to write a save file because localStorage is full, the old save files will still be fine, and you could still restore them or download them for use in desktop interpreters. And if you can delete some of the older save files then space will be freed to make new save files again.

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Web browsers allocate save data per website (domain name), so if you’re playing them both on iplayif.com then they use up the same space, yeah. If they’re on different sites they’d be separate.

And worse, browsers don’t give websites a way to know how much storage they’re giving you or what fraction you’re using up, so you only find out when you actually run out. It’s kind of a mess, unfortunately.

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Thanks for your reply. I think something else must’ve happened then, as the old save files didn’t work in Spatterlight, which (I think) is the desktop interpreter. I’m obviously kind of a noob with understanding this issue, so it’s probably some issue with the browser plus my olde fashioned computer.

Good to know for the future - I’ll try to maybe clear my cashe then - if that’ll fix it? Thanks!!

They are supposed to work, unless the saves were made in a different version of the game. If you want to, you can send me one of the save files, and I’ll try to find out what is wrong.

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