Ridiculous Fishing is a game by Vlambeer about fishing. That's if you can call chainsawing fish and blowing them out of the sky with a bazooka "fishing".
I've been playing this game on and off for a while now, but just recently I had a problem where my save file somehow got corrupted, making the app refuse to open.
The problem first manifested as the game freezing for up to 5 seconds when navigating around the UI or buying items in the in-game store. Since I was running the game on a Nexus 5 (not the latest and greatest, but pretty close), it seemed weird. The delay got longer and longer until the game eventually crashed and refused to reopen.
Since I was pretty far into the game (I only needed to catch one more species of fish!), I opted to try to fix it instead of just wiping the app's data and starting again. I initially tried clearing the app's cache and reinstalling the app, but the problem persisted.
The next step was to dump the games's data to my computer so I could do some
analysis on it. Some exploration on the device revealed that the settings and
data were stored in the folder /data/data/com.vlambeer.RidiculousFishing.humble
(I have the Humble Bundle version of the app).
To pull that folder to my current directory, I used ADB:
1 2 | |
A quick du -h revealed that something was very wrong in the
files/Library/Preferences/com.vlambeer.RidiculousFishing.humble.plist file.
It should've been just a text document, but was well over 200MB.
After trying out of habit to open the file in Vim and having it hang (oops),
I paged through the document with less. About halfway through the file,
there was a line containing <message>@eggbirdTBA Take it to the
Smartypants Bar (no, that's not a formatting error, in the plist there's XML
data stored in a <string> element, requiring the < and > characters to be
escaped) followed by about 200MB of garbage.
Apparently there are ways to load huge files in Vim, as well as other text editors that handle them nicely, but since I already knew what line was causing the issue, a simple sed command would do the trick.
1 | |
Total size of temp.plist: 107.11KB. Much better.
After going though and deleting some lines around the one that was removed (to make the XML valid again), I pushed the file back to the device:
1 | |
Success! The game opened properly, all the freezing issues were gone, and my save data was still there.
Now to find that stupid Mimic Fish...