- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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This is why I have no tolerance for games with limited saving… Which is painful as a Resident Evil fan who prefers the early games
(No surprise that I use unlimited saving mods)
Waaay too much trouble to compare the time-of-last-save with minimum-time-to-ask-save. 🙄
Or even just “Has the menu been closed since it was saved?”
That’s harder to implement. Suddenly you need to store that extra state somewhere and don’t mess it up. The last save should already have a timestamp and is immutable. A lot less likely to get bugs that way.
Do you not need to store that state to pause the game anyway? How else would you end the menu loop?
The state “the game is paused” is different from " the game is paused and saved". Sure that could be another key in some atate machine but like above: it’s the “not mess it up” part that is harder.
I feel like I’ve seen a “Time since last save:” line on enough games to find it hard to believe that “paused and saved” is difficult to check for lol
These are variables that already exist in most games, it just needs one more line of code to check them
Plus all the lines to update the state, when the menu is closed, when the game is closed (i.e should it be true or false at startup), when the game is saved obviously.
That’s at least three more lines plus the one you mentioned for no extra value. And again it’s easier to screw it up e.g. while refactoring.
I think we write our code in different enough ways that we’re not seeing eye to eye.
Tracking the state of the game being paused, when the menu is open and when the game is saved can all be a single match statement on a current “game state” variable which just holds “running/paused/paused and saved/exit” and when it becomes exit, it checks the save time. Only 2 lines of code and adding an enumerated state to the variable to add this functionality. Since the variable is enumerated, it’s really difficult to mess it up when refactoring because if you can’t pass the wrong code or else your game doesn’t save or close
Literally a single boolean lol
It’s the “don’t mess it up” part that is harder.
I think it’s no mans sky that tells you how long ago your last save was before you leave. That’s the ideal.
I think the ideal is to have 3 buttons - “Save”, “Quit”, and “Save & Quit”
Agreed, but you still need a confirmation on the quit button to ask if you are sure you want to quit without saving.
But also include the time of/since the last save.
Day 347: I’m still trying to exit the game. Send help, I can’t close the game without losing my progress!
Ah a first time vim
userplayer.
Even worse. Games with a mysterious auto save “feature” that don’t allow a manual backup save. There’s a special place in hell for those developers.
There’s also a place in hell for devs who don’t include a “save and quit” in rogue like games because they’re worried people will save scum. As if honest people who can’t devote enough time for a full playthrough are less important than people lying about progress in a non competitive single player game.
I assume it’s more about the hassle of implementing a way of serializing the game state for storage in most cases but if people want to cheat in a single player game let them or better yet seed the rng so that the outcome is the same anyways.
Idk, I feel that’s okay as long as the saves are incredibly frequent and reliable.
I’ve never lost progress in a From Software game for instance, and they have an only auto save system, but it saves literally everything you do as soon as you do it, so unless you deliberately alt-F4 instantly after doing something, you won’t lose any progress.
Can you reload old saves, or only the most recent? I think being able to reload an older save is important in the case of glitches (NPC walks through wall and is unreachable etc)
They solved that by having most of the game revert to starting positions frequently (e.g. every time you die, area load).
Maybe not as immersive as Bethesda games but their lore at least tries to make sense of it.
It’s more like playing the Edge of Tomorrow movie, you need to learn where everything is.
