Posted July 10, 2017
I have been analyzing the issues I described in the "Achievements not popping" thread, and with a lot of logging and experiments, I have discovered what goes on here.
Yooka-Laylee has a built in achievement system, which registers unlocked achievements in the profile.dat file, which is stored in the users AppData area.
This works just fine when installing and using the game without GOG Galaxy, but when running the game with GOG Galaxy installed, it seems like GOG takes over the tracking of achievements, which will force the game to cancel all achievements that were unlocked before GOG Galaxy was installed and any changes to the settings will cause the before mentioned profile.dat file to be overwritten with the GOG tracked achievements.
Fortunately I had a backup of my saved games and profile for the game, but restoring that did not fix the achievement problem, as the game launches GalaxyCommunication.exe on start, which overrides the profile.dat again.
As long as GalaxyCommunication.exe still exists in the ProgramData GOG.com sub folder, it will be launched and cause this problem, as it syncs with GOG Galaxy online and recreates the online achievements every time.
I even found the files that are synced and renamed the folder for it, which makes my achievements work again as long as I am offline, which causes GalaxyCommunication.exe to create a new folder, but as soon as I go online again, it overwrites my data again.
To try and find a fix for this I even tried disabling all the features in GOG Galaxy, but this did not fix the problem either, which I would consider a bug in the system. Disabling cloud saves and/or achievements should be a valid way to fix the problem, but it is not the case :(
At this point, if I want to keep my achievements in the game, my only option is to uninstall GOG Galaxy and remove the "GOG.com" folder from my ProgramData manually as this is not always removed by uninstalling GOG Galaxy, which I would also consider a bug. It seems GalaxyCommunication.exe keeps running for a while, even after closing games and the client, which causes the uninstallation to be incomplete, so it might be a good idea to check for this after uninstalling.
It is unclear which of these problems are caused by GOG and which are by Playtonic Games, so I think this forum is the right place to put this. If any of these companies read this, please respond so I know my analysis is not in vain.
For other users, I hope this gives you a chance to avoid or fix the problems, so you won't have to loose achievements when playing offline.
Yooka-Laylee has a built in achievement system, which registers unlocked achievements in the profile.dat file, which is stored in the users AppData area.
This works just fine when installing and using the game without GOG Galaxy, but when running the game with GOG Galaxy installed, it seems like GOG takes over the tracking of achievements, which will force the game to cancel all achievements that were unlocked before GOG Galaxy was installed and any changes to the settings will cause the before mentioned profile.dat file to be overwritten with the GOG tracked achievements.
Fortunately I had a backup of my saved games and profile for the game, but restoring that did not fix the achievement problem, as the game launches GalaxyCommunication.exe on start, which overrides the profile.dat again.
As long as GalaxyCommunication.exe still exists in the ProgramData GOG.com sub folder, it will be launched and cause this problem, as it syncs with GOG Galaxy online and recreates the online achievements every time.
I even found the files that are synced and renamed the folder for it, which makes my achievements work again as long as I am offline, which causes GalaxyCommunication.exe to create a new folder, but as soon as I go online again, it overwrites my data again.
To try and find a fix for this I even tried disabling all the features in GOG Galaxy, but this did not fix the problem either, which I would consider a bug in the system. Disabling cloud saves and/or achievements should be a valid way to fix the problem, but it is not the case :(
At this point, if I want to keep my achievements in the game, my only option is to uninstall GOG Galaxy and remove the "GOG.com" folder from my ProgramData manually as this is not always removed by uninstalling GOG Galaxy, which I would also consider a bug. It seems GalaxyCommunication.exe keeps running for a while, even after closing games and the client, which causes the uninstallation to be incomplete, so it might be a good idea to check for this after uninstalling.
It is unclear which of these problems are caused by GOG and which are by Playtonic Games, so I think this forum is the right place to put this. If any of these companies read this, please respond so I know my analysis is not in vain.
For other users, I hope this gives you a chance to avoid or fix the problems, so you won't have to loose achievements when playing offline.