Autosave?

[Frumple]

Would be nice. Thing that gets me the most nowadays is odd one-off crashes that either send a character back to level 1 or eat up a few hours of effort. Not having to remember to esc->f every level or so would be pleasing, if it's possible.

[darkgod]

Humm, the thing is saveing can be a tad long sometimes.
Maybe only at zone change ?

[Frumple]

Anything would be better than nothing, yah. Saving can be a little lengthy, but even with a processor throttled down to about a gig's power it's not particularly terrible. I've certainly seen longer ones, ayuh. Just having it as a config option or somethin' would be wonderful, though, 'specially if increment or trigger (zone change, level gain, X # of turns, etc) could be modified.

Though I do notice save process's time increases as you go along. First level save's pretty short, yeah, but getting one off at the bottom of the sand pit whatsit takes a noticeably longer period... which I guess isn't much of a surprise, heh.

[darkgod]

Yes to avoid load/save on level change I keep all levels of the current zone in memory, they are written to disk only when leaving. The more you exlpore the more there is to save, but it's never more than one zone.

[forkbomb]

Humm, the thing is saveing can be a tad long sometimes.
Maybe only at zone change ?

Is that a limitation of the new engine? SDL or lua limitation or something? Seems like not providing an autosave function because of slow saves is like putting a bandaid two inches away from the wound. Can save speed be improved? I hope so - complexity of the engine and module is likely to increase with time and I'd only expect saves to get slow, but I'm only hazarding a guess.

Either way, an autosave wouldn't have to be mandatory, right? Could be an option. Those who want to manually save or save only upon exit wouldn't need to be shoehorned into using autosave.

[Canderel]

Admittedly, getting an autosave is also like a bandaid... if we can get the game to not have the odd crash... That'd be much cooler.

But I think autosave on gaining a level... that sounds like a good event to do it on. Or a prompted autosave... Like you've gained a level, want to save?

[darkgod]

Possibly yes
If the only known crash is the music one then it's fine.

And savefile times wont get much bigger, they are mostly only dependent on level size & number of levels per zone.

[MistMage]

Hi. This is my first post here so I just thought I'd say hi first.

Anyway, I just thought I'd say that I think that an autosave feature would be a good thing. I just lost a bunch of work on an operating system failure, so as you see a stable game is no guarantee for avoiding crashes.

[Gwai]

Just to echo what's been said, I'd be happy to wait to have the confidence of an auto-save.

[registeringislame]

You know if you pad parts of the savefile to take constant amounts of space, you can just write those parts using fseek(), or even just write changes as the differences.

[darkgod]

You say taht because you do not know how TE4 savefiles work
They are zipped directories of files, each being a serialization of a lua object
They are not binaries at all just zipped text, this is needed so that module authors dont have to fiddle with savefiles at all it's all nearly automatic !

[FACM]

You say taht because you do not know how TE4 savefiles work
They are zipped directories of files, each being a serialization of a lua object
They are not binaries at all just zipped text, this is needed so that module authors dont have to fiddle with savefiles at all it's all nearly automatic !

I discovered this working on my module, and it was somewhat helpful in debugging one or two issues so far ("What do you mean that property was null? Lemme check my character and... oh, I misspelled it.")

[Vanguard]

I would recommend having everything save when you save zones, because if the game crashes after one thing was saved and the rest isn't, you get wacky (and gamebreaking) results.

[Final Master]

Is the auto save still necessary? There have been very few crash reports in the last few betas and they seem to be getting fixed and reported very soon after each new beta release.

[darkgod]

Yes it is due to the multi-files nature of the saves.

However that problem of desync'ed files should not happen anymore as all fileshave a unique id and the main file knows which it can load and ignores the rest