I've had this happen a number of times. Game crashes or gets killed by the OS (this time my UPS battery failed and the OS shut down quickly), then the next time you open it, it wipes out config.ini, starting over as if it was a new install with the robo-voice tutorial that you can't quit and awful looking 800x600 resolution.

How hard would it be to make the game save a backup copy before overwriting that file if there's something wrong? Some of us have a lot of stuff customized in there...

wgaf.cfg too, please.

I can understand having all of this. I personally experiment a lot, so I'm in the habit of backing up my own files all the time as I've learned the hard way in my life the value of backed up data, but not everyone is so paranoid.

and the errors.log :)

No, the errors.log should be clobbered. It's not supposed to be an ongoing activity log, but a client session log.

I had an older backup copy I was able to get most of my settings back, but I'm not the only person this happens to.

Errors should be clobbered, but there should be a rolling chat log instead of writing chat to errors.

Or, like non lazy ppl normally do.. they copy their known good copys of config.ini and wgaf.cfg to something else, oh .. say, config.ini.backup and wgaf.cfg.backup. :P

A seperate chat log would be a good idea though. Never understood why this all went into a file called errors.log in the first place.

Another idea is to just whip together a quick bash script that cron runs every so often to copy that stuff over to a backup directory. And ya, it does suck when you have to setup everything again.

Get a new battery for your UPS yet Arf?

Another option to consider is to change the ownership of these files to a different user and just make them 755 permissions....or would that break updates?

But I agree with vskye, if you have a lot of customization, back these files up. I would set up some form of version control and write a small script to check the files in nightly or weekly depending on your level of paranoia.

I just have my system set up to use rdiff-backup to make incremental backups of most of my home directory every time I shut down.

I have these files backed up, like I said. The only really time-consuming part was re-calibrating joysticks. The big problem here is the behavior of the game makes for a really shitty user experience.

Here we have a situation where my PC shut down properly because there was less than 2 minutes of UPS run time left. Applications were sent SIGTERM and filesystems all unmounted safely. Vendetta somehow corrupted its own configuration files and decided to overwrite them silently the next time I started the game. You then have to sit through the space voice "Galactic Training Simulator" again at 800x600, full screen with no way to skip it.

Even worse, is the default settings it applied were the ones for some mobile platform, not the PC client. None of the usual keys were bound. The console didn't work (` was unbound), Esc didn't work to open the menu in-flight, and the only things bound to flight controls were things like like "ThumbLeft" and "JoyButtonA"

How many times has somebody complained about the game losing their settings or not saving changes?