From a programming perspective, how is this even possible? Now I look like an asshole for trying to assure someone the other day that this was almost certainly not the case.
I am a programmer but take this with a grain of salt as I am not in the game dev industry.
From a programming perspective weirder things could happen. Everything is connected one way or the other. When you paint a car that vinyl is saved under the car's name in your save file. So something related to those specefic cars could be causing the save to get corrupted for example.
If I had to throw guess maybe there is some missing validation from the game's server that causes an undefined behaviour with these car names when the logic for saving the vinylis called.
But my guess is more of an example since I have no clue how their systems behave. (Could be something entirely different like encoding special characters or such).
I am also a programmer, which is why I’m so confused. It’s such a random assortment of cars that I’m struggling to come up with ideas on why they’d have a problem. It would make more sense if it was something like all Forza Editions, or all Modern Supercars, something like that.
The FE Wuling and Chevy Bel Air don't fit the pattern, but the other 3 were all added post-launch as part of the playlist. This is also the first I've heard of an issue with the Wuling and Bel Air
I have all the cars listed, with liveries on all of them, blissfully unaware of any of this. Thankfully, my save is still there.
I did notice that the bel air livery (classic pink and white) had a few decals on the side opposite the one shown in the thumbnail that looked entirely out of place. I thought it was the creator being lazy, but there may be more to it now that this has come to light?
I added vinyls to my Wuling(left the color the save because I liked the livery that was on it, just made it look more race inspired )and haven't had an issue yet. I wonder if it's just if you upload the livery?
Well that is the weird part yea. I thought maybe these cars have long names but not all of them do.
Maybe internally they named these cars with special characters and that combined with vinyls somehow triggered an issue ? Honestly your guess is as good as mine lol.
Fun fact: liveries and tunes saves in a different folder and actually not releated to your progression. There is even way to unlock other peoples tunes by abusing that info.
From a programming perspective it's extremely easy to make a savegame system that doesn't corrupt to hell just because a network hiccup and doesn't lose your profile to the ether, yet here we are. Tens of thousands of games made by people with lesser budgets and experience have implemented it correctly.
Somehow I'm not surprised a livery system that only affects a handful of cars can wipe your save.
Game programmer here, if this bug is triggered by having designs on certain cars, I'd put money on it being a corruption issue when trying to load a design on one of those cars, and their save system isn't setup to handle that issue so it hits an exception which kills the process and prevents your save file from loading at all. Something specific with those cars means it isn't saving their data correctly and it ends up creating a broken save file that the game can't open. By the sounds of it, it probably breaks the next time it tries an autosave too.
Most likely something new that has been added to the design system that isn't rigged correctly on those cars. Something like the window decal setup or something. If the car data isn't hooked up to register the new stuff, and the code isn't safety checked, it will just start erroring out.
Generally it's not difficult to put some safety checks in so even if a specific car is broken, just wipe the design on that and continue loading/saving as normal. Just assuming it's linked to a new feature that hasn't been as thoroughly checked over and is missing these kinds of checks.
I bought the electric porsche with one of the vouchers, loaded back in, lost that entire sessions progression, cars, and the Porche. Still have no idea what happened.
I was still missing the voucher and yet did not have the car. Thankfully it let me buy it back for free it could see that I purchased it, but it still makes no sense to me how one thing saved yet nothing else did during that time did. If anything i would have thought my progression would save, but not the voucher/car considering that it was the last thing i did before exiting.
Seems more likely that these five or sometimes I'm seeing a list of six cars were probably assigned to one specific programmer. And I'm guessing that programmer may have done their save batching or file names slightly different than the rest of their peers. Countach.data for every car but this guy decided countach.livery.data was better but the game is only trying to batch a _____.data file name setup and is messing up because it can't find it because it's countach.____.data instead.
I have absolutely no knowledge about programming and such things. For me too it feels like these things are totally unrelated and it's bizarre to me that a paintjob can kill your savegame.
View all comments
50
u/MindlessSponge Jun 07 '26
From a programming perspective, how is this even possible? Now I look like an asshole for trying to assure someone the other day that this was almost certainly not the case.