Hi, please make your games for Ipod Touch and Iphone! All are awesome!!

I’m not sure why but this solution (first one) doesn’t work with me. I still loose all progress and save after i restart my computer.

To save games in Mac, after you leave the game, make a copy of ‘Macromedia’ folder in your desktop (is in ~/library/preferences).
This is where your saved slots are. Before resuming the game (after a restart. for example) replace ‘Macromedia’ (in preferences) with the previously saved ‘Macromedia’.

This works for me (Snow Leopard, 10.6.2)

Excellente game, music. Feels like ‘Myst’ all over again!

You should put a warning inside the game with instructions on how to fix this, so people know what to do BEFORE they lose saved games. The warning should be very large & it should be displayed the first time you run Machinarium. All saved games will be deleted by BetterPrivacy when you close Firefox unless the Machinarium Flash object is specifically protected. Many people will not even bother to finish the game after this happens. Some have received advertising phone calls after visiting a site because different sites are sharing information about their visitors using persistent cookies. People should not be punished by software developers for deleting Flash cookies and other tracking files. In the future, you should avoid using Flash as a game creation tool.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/flash_cookies.html
http://www.ghostery.com/

Hi!
Im a game programmer in Quebec, Canada. My game designer just told us about this game yesterday, Ive just tried the demo and finally bought the full game!
I just wanted to congratulate you and your team on this great piece of work that reminds me of old days with “Day of the Tentacle”, “Myst” and other great click & puzzle games.
The music is awesome, the art is breathless and the game is very addictive!

Félicitations! (Congrats)
Keep up the good work!

I didn’t understand the concluding part of your article, could you please explain it more?

Congratulations for this one, you took my breath. Make sure to expand your profit by putting this on the iPad, or iPhone – it would be a SCREAMER.

Great game. Well worth the (low) price. Graphics are great (love the “pencil-drawn” look. The main character and its interaction with the other characters is very charming. The puzzles are challenging without being frustratingly difficult (well, except for the nuts & bolts game). I’ll be watching for a sequel! :)

Please, please fix this or something, I guess backing up my .sol file will work, but it really doesn’t do it for me to have to backup the file after each play, and put the backed-up one back in place myself. I mean, I’ll do it, cause I want to play, but I wish it could be better :(

Ccleaner users, i think i have just found a soloution to lost saved games, restart pc then run game till you want to quit, then ,SAVE YOUR GAME, exit, then run Ccleaner, go to options and select cookies,there will be two for flash machinarium, then transfere them to the right hand box, it worked for me, on widows XP,sp3,

Great game but… Um, after playing for hours and days, and thinking I had saved games, today I opened it to find them all GONE.

A few days ago I was running low on disk space so I ran CCleaner to clean out *browser* temp files and other files.

Since Machinarium is a program I downloaded and installed as a bona fide .exe program, I certainly did not expect that its save files would be included in those wiped out by a program that cleans out *temp files*.

Your game is great, but after pouring a LOT of time and energy into getting to a certain point in the game, just to see it all irrevocably destroyed, I am quite frankly disgusted.

I’ve gone from wanting to loudly tell everyone I knew about how wonderful this game was, to being disgusted by the very thought of it and never wanting to see or play it again, because it would remind me of all the progress I lost.

You either need to abandon flash as your medium or find a way to make it so the game save files are not stored in locations considered by normal programs to be temp file locations. Since that may be a consequence of using flash, see suggestion #1.

I just feel betrayed and disgusted, and will never play your game again, or other games I might have otherwise enthusiastically purchased also (and I did purchase Machinarium) because of this incident.

@Anthooony

come on guy get a life and try not to be such a drama queen – it sucks – just because you stumbled upon one of the most intelligent games ever developed does not mean that you have to bother people with your lack of understanding technology and your whining about a overloaded bloody PC. Get a Mac for gods sake, get lots of disk space-I heard you don’t have to sell your soul for it – and get on with it – just do me one big favour and stop crying about your own misery ! This would be greatly appreciated indeed.

And now live well for the rest of your counted time, my son… Ag shame, and after drying your tears you may still tell some nice and friendly people about this game anyway

This is not part of the puzzle. I have a MAC and it still is a problem.

Лично у меня всё хорошо загружается и сохраняется☺☻♥!(Коробочная версия)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! You mean I have to play through practically the whole friggin’ game again because I lost my saves? I’m not sure I’m willing to do that.

So very very very very very annoying.

People would not expect that using CCleaner to clean out their browser cache would blow away their Machinarium saves. This is a bad bug. If nothing else, you *REALLY* need to warn people about this in the Save screen.

Almost a perfect game. If it weren’t for the fact that the savegames are prone to deletion in the course of standard computer maintenance, it would be five stars.

How could the programmers make (and fail to correct) such a glaring error?

Windows users can put this cmd-script in the Machinarium install folder (where machinarium.exe is located) and use it to keep the savegames file (Machinarium.sol) persistent:

rem ** put this into a file called machinarium_copy_run.cmd
rem ** and run this script instead of machinarium.exe
rem **
rem ********** copy local savegame-file to Flash folder **********
IF EXIST “.\Machinarium.sol” (
IF NOT EXIST “%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\*\*” (
MKDIR “%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\EXMKCYZU”
)
FOR /D %%i IN (“%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\*”) DO XCOPY /D /Y “.\Machinarium.sol” “%%i\localhost\games\Machinarium\machinarium.exe\”
)

rem ********** run the game **********
machinarium.exe

rem ********** copy the updated savegame-file from Flash to local folder **********
FOR /D %%i IN (“%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\*”) DO XCOPY /D /Y “%%i\localhost\games\Machinarium\machinarium.exe\Machinarium.sol” .

PAUSE

The script posted in my previous comment was automatically changed by the website – it replaced the standard quotation marks with “beautiful” quotes.
When you copy&paste the script from the website to your text editor, make sure that you replace all those quotes with the standard typewriter quote (HTML &quot, Unicode 0×0022, shift-2 on UK- or DE-keyboard, shift-’ on US-keyboard).

I feel quite jaded to have to come onto the Internet to find a solution to the deletion of my save files–yes this has happened before, before I figured out it wasn’t my fault that saves were being deleted from my hard drive. Right now I’m pretty damn pissed off about my save being deleted since I had gotten pretty far and it would take more time than I’d care to spend trying to get back to where I was. Even though I have this fixed now, it’s doubtful I’ll even finish the game because I feel totally slighted here. I mean developers should know that having safe, stable save files is a MUST. In the future I’ll think twice about giving you guys any money–hell, I probably won’t even buy another one of your games if it’s made with flash.

I’m not just having a pissed-off rant here, I’m serious about what I’ve said. I hope you make better save systems in the future or you’ll lose customers like you did just now.

@Chris

What Anthony said is truthful and quit trying to use this page to glorify Macs. I have one, one that I didn’t use to play this game on, but they’re not the end-all computer. I don’t think he nor I regret what we’ve said and quite frankly to see your save files deleted because of developers’ shortsightedness is not our fault, so we have the right to complain.

@Marvin42

Your method doesn’t work on Windows Vista because even after I change the extension it still wants to recognize the file as a text document. I tried opening the file itself using the command line, but it wouldn’t do anything–I mean the command line would pop up but it would just have a directory listing with the cursor blinking beside it. I’ve tried all the ways I could think of to get it to work, even going so far as to make all text documents open in the command line… obviously that didn’t work either and I changed it back. I believe that it does work, but maybe only in other Windows OS’s. Maybe it’s my fault I couldn’t get it to work, but I followed all your directions.

I give up on this game.

For people whining here. CCleaner and BetterPrivacy both warn you THIS WILL DELETE STUFF PERMANENTLY and they DONT delete just “browser stuff”. You’ll have to admit it’s your own stupidity if you just use a program to PERMANENTLY DELETE stuff before you even knwo what it deletes!!

In Brazilian Portuguese version of Windows XP the save path is: C:\Documents and Settings\{USERNAME}\Dados de aplicativos\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\{RANDOMWORD}\localhost\Arquivos de programas\Machinarium\machinarium.exe

Regards,
Igor Isaias Banlian

Anyone who wants to follow what Marvin42 said needs to save the file as “all files”, not the default text file option. This seems obvious, but if you were to save it as a text file first and then try to “save as” with the new “all files” option, then it still won’t save it right. Just make sure to save it right the first time.

Then, make a shortcut of the file to your desktop (after putting the .cmd file in the program file directory like he says) and right click it and go into properties. Then change the boring looking icon with the Machinarium one that can be found with an easy google search. Oh, you might need to open the picture up with an image editing program to re-save it as a .ico file so you can use it. And voilà, your shortcut on your desktop looks (about) the same as the original.

Good thing I pirated this, so nothing lost. I will burn to disk and hand out copies to everyone I can.
THANKS FOR THE WARNING AFTER I LOST THE SAVES !!!

Amanita poeple, this issue makes your beautifully-designed game absolutely NO FUN to play – I am with andrew above in that I am sick of trying to figure it out. “Developers should know that having safe, stable save files is a MUST” – I agree 100%! I am running Machinarium on Mac, I’ve tried EVERYTHING you suggested here, and my saves have disappeared randomly several times now. I, too, give up on this game, until you come up with a solution that isn’t a major pain in the backside…

I don’t see any save slots. All I have is play and resume game. (I play on steam if that helps; mac) So I started a new game to show my wife the first level, and now I lost everything!

Love the game, but this has taken 100% of the fun out. I was very happy with my progress, and now I have to go through the first 1/2 of the game all over again.

Fix this problem or you will loose customers!

Good game, but I not a fan of using LSO for saving the games. At a minimum you should present a warning so that people don’t lose their game! I just played for several hours, saved the game, verified it showed up under load, and quit and still lost it because I block LSO storage.

ever heard about apple’s time-machine????? TIME-MACHINE!
every loyal apple user won’t have any problems to bring back the slots. and then a copy from the macromedia-folder after saving and there’s nothing to care about. it’s a cool game, art is beautiful.
don’t get sick about human kind, wasn’t on purpose, sure! frustrating minds sucks!

Machinarium is creating a new directory every time I use it. In order to keep save files I have to repeat this procedure in Better Privacy every time I load Firefox.

The saves just keep getting deleted. I regret spending money on this game, I should have just pirated it. I’m trying the command script solution, but if it doesn’t work, I’m done with Machinarium. It’s too bad, the game was kind of fun too.

yes guys i`m with steve and andrew , its a nice game but i refuse to play it from the begining for a sixth time and i`m not geeky enough to reconfigure windows XP etc.. to treat this as a special case. i`ll never buy anything else with the AMANITA name on it.