Transfer between phones?

[fjp]

I had to replace my damaged droid (which still had basic functionality so I could run the game and access the SD card).

I looked around but couldn't find a way to backup or transfer my captains to my new phone (and boy was it painful to lose all those hours!)

Is there a way?

[slayernz]

From my understanding, there is no way to shift your captains from one device to another shy of taking a backup of your phone itself and restoring the backup on your new device (assuming you have an identical device).

The good news is that all of a sudden, you have a whole heap of new awards and unlocks to go for (again), and you get to experience the thrill of pushing a pile of wannabe captains through the "Crazy/Insane" level mincer in the hope that one pops out the other end.

[vwllss]

Well, he might be able to keep them if he used something like Titanium Backup.

[fjp]

Tried using Astro backup & restore on an original Droid. Works for the game itself, but not the saved data.

I'll look into the Titanium backup though because this was the case for a lot of my app stored data.

BTW: Before I lost the data, I meant to mention a bug on purchasing 'Extended Gun Decks' after The captain had qualified for it. I saw the award listed in the captains record, but could not purchase it at any star dock.

Thanks!

[Cory Trese]

Sometimes the upgrade is unlocked, but not available for sale at the Stardock. Keep searching.

There is a big miss with Cloud Save / Phone-To-Phone transfers. The team over at Google really gave me an earful about that miss last week. I think the point they made was is that ST RPG is a very "I accomplished this" type game and not allowing a smooth way to transfer is a big way to loose customers.

Stings a little bit, but you guys are right. Part of the balancing act I am trying to deal with is that trade off between permissions and portability. If ST RPG could read phone state, write SD cards and Internet Full, we'd be in business but I doubt so many people would agree.

[slayernz]

Seriously, even with those attributes your app would be one of the less pervasive ones on the market, and now days people have become so desensitized about the privileges that applications are asking, I doubt you'd cause even 1% of potential customers to shy away.

Further, those who do even a little digging and stumble across these forums will see just how ethical and trustworthy you are.

Enabling captain transfers in a way similar to the free-->Elite method is at least a good start. However, one thing that people would desperately want transferred would be the unlocks that they busted their tail feathers working on. You could take a poll and ask the following:

What sort of transfer ability would you be willing to settle for:
1) Game transfer - I don't need no steenkeng game transfer!
2) I just want the unlocks copied over - starting with a new character is good fun if the unlocks are available
3) I just want my captains transferred - they are part of my soul now and I couldn't give them up if the devil asked me to.
4) I want the captains AND unlocks transferred - too much blood has been spilled getting to this point and I'll go postal otherwise.
5) I want captains, unlocks AND my game cache transferred so I can pick up exactly where I left off, complete with embargoes/alliances intact
6) I want the ability to transfer my consciousness into your app so I can FLY the ships myself.

[oldalchemist]

Captain transfer is a backdoor save game. Boo.

Either you store the accounts on a server somewhere so that a game exists in only one place or you keep it local.

I want to be able to play without being online. My bathroom is a Faraday Cage.

[fjp]

My 2 cents would be that I *Really* like the fact that the game has no special requirements. I don't play a lot of games on my phone and it was a big factor in my choice. It basically it proved to me the app was safe to use/run. Although I do think that write to SD is an acceptable compromise. If the ability to transfer info could be based on just that privilege I think it'd be worth the time to wait for the development.
Oh and on Slayernz's scale I guess I'd be a 2-3 (not postal enough for #4! ;-) )

One more clarification. The 'Extended Gun Decks' was listed at Stardocks as available, The purchase button was active, it clicked, but just didn't do anything.

[Cory Trese]

I will investigate the bug.

I think that the best solution is a second application called "Star Traders Game Manager" and I will put that one full of permissions and such not, as well as give it the ability to poke about in the other app's business. =)

That way it can extract the saved game file to SD card or send to Google Cloud services.

[fjp]

I like that solution a lot. No need to muck about inside the game itself trying to adapt it's internals to a different way of doing things. Plus, to be fair, there can be a *modest* donation ;-) for the extra capabilities!

[sgtcookie]

Unless I am mistaken, all this new app has to do is save the Star Traders data to an external, transferable location.

Shouldn't be too hard.

[Cory Trese]

SgtCookie -- It has to be able to extract and load the DB from at least the Elite version, probably both. It also needs to be able to tell the difference between the databases (without using the Star Traders RPG libraries, if possible.)

And I have to build an interface, add the permissions, test it and so forth. It sounds simple but it turns out that from idea to download from Android market takes a lot more effort than one might think at first.

[Cory Trese]

Not to be negative. I'm working on this now

[slayernz]

Any STRPG character vacuum cleaner should only support transferring Elite characters from device to device.
A) this reduces the amount of edge-case coding you have to worry about.
B) it makes moving to Elite all the more important as if you haven't bought Elite, then part of the disadvantage of going from device to device is the fact you have to start from scratch again.

[oldalchemist]

Can I get Extended Deck Guns transferred to my Faraday Cage?