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Saving an Loading games


Krisch

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I wonder why I haven't found this on the forums!?

Why is there no simple saving and loading mechanism?

I have the feeling this topic must have been discussed already, but I didn't find it.

At least some sort of quicksave mechanism (1-3 slots), just in case something goes awry.

I can always use the windows explorer to manually make copies of the save game, I guess?

 

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Because it's not only a save game (the game has no saved games only worlds you play in)? And save games only make sense for single player gameplay, but the game isn't designed to be exclusively singleplayer, therefore you'd have to implement different structures for singleplayer and multiplayer worlds, which would mean no more opening the single player world to play multiplayer on it and vice versa.

You can set your respawn point anywhere, why have a quicksave option? There is no gameover, death is only a minor setback.

Edited by Hal13
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I do have a SaveGame, I can load this, can duplicate it, can copy it. It is a persisted world, which is basically a save game. A DB backup is basically a SaveGame IMHO.
There is no technical reason why this is not integrated into the single-player mode of the game. I also think this could be integrated into a mod.

Unless the reasoning is: This is a multi-player game and we do not want to put any effort into the rudimentary single-player part.

It is not something I myself want, actually. But I keep getting questions regarding this in my stream from chatters (dKrisch TTV).

 

Edited by Aphadan
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It does sound like a feature a mod could implement, yes. Just like Minecraft, which also has no save system, but there are mods that (for example) run a backup every X minutes.

You could have such a mod, and map a hotkey to "trigger backup now". That's your quicksave. Well, "quick" depends on your world size, really. It might take 10 seconds or so for larger worlds.

The loading aspect, on the other hand, would be more tricky. The game is not set up to just discard all data on the running world at the tap of a button. It is built with the expectation that before you load a world, an already running world is shut down in an orderly fashion.

Honestly, the fastest valid method of "quickload" might turn out to be Alt+F4, restart client, load saved world. This could potentially corrupt the world you quit out of, but then again, you want to load a different state anyway...

So if the backup mod could write its latest backup into the save file directory so that it shows up as a separate option in the list when you go to load a world, that would work. But it would still be much more clumsy than a classic F5/F9 setup.

 

Edited by Streetwind
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This sounds good.
I guess most people would only need some sort of "Quick" save. Loading is (as Hal13 already said)  not as important, because dying is not such a big issue in VS.

I might just work myself into modding... I am a developer after all.

I do wonder though if this is a mod that many people would like to see?
Feedback appreciated :D 

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7 hours ago, Streetwind said:

It might take 10 seconds or so for larger worlds.

Considering how long save&exit takes, most of that time is quite likely the save part, (normally takes a minute or two on my computer) 10 seconds seems to be a rather generous assumption for a save&backup feature.

6 hours ago, Aphadan said:

I do wonder though if this is a mod that many people would like to see?

 

8 hours ago, Aphadan said:

But I keep getting questions regarding this in my stream from chatters

I'd guess there will be people that could be interested, why else should any viewer of yours ask such a question? But I doubt there will be "many". I assume most VS players played Minecraft, Don't Starve or other similar games before, which only save on exit (or constantly protocol changes to the world and the save on exit only saves the player characters state), to me that seems to be the default for survival games and quite many simulations too. Which could quite likely be the reason that question was never discussed on the forum before...

8 hours ago, Aphadan said:

There is no technical reason why this is not integrated into the single-player mode of the game. [...]

Unless the reasoning is: This is a multi-player game and we do not want to put any effort into the rudimentary single-player part.

It's not a pure multi-player game, but it has no dedicated single-player mode either, such a mode would take up additional time and work and with only 2 programmers (one of them does the accounting, marketing, administration of website and forum, etc too) on a team of 7 people these are ressources better invested in further improving and developing the whole game (only my opinion i can't speak for them).

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Quick save is typical feature for prescripted games with fixed world with minimal changes during playing (e.g. Halflife, Doom, and many others). Quick save means saving player position, his inventory and stage of game - very few data. Operation is usually very quick and takes seconds max tens of seconds.

Minecraft style games have usually huge worlds with a lot of changes of world data (new buildings, generated terrain that could be changed, many chests with materials, etc etc). So saving means to copy all that information - hundreds of megabytes, sometimes gigabytes. Using term "quick save" is somehow misunderstanding of scale of such procedure.

You can easily run VS DB backup operation. But for your information this operation takes on our server (before upgrade to quick SSD disk) circa 45 minutes. This is really NOT quick save and can't be practically used for real quick save during playing. Thats why I think it's totally not usable and most of the players will not demand such a function.

"Unless the reasoning is: This is a multi-player game and we do not want to put any effort into the rudimentary single-player part."

I think the reasoning is: we do not want to put any effort into something what isn't practically usable.

My hint: set "keep inventory on death", use temporal gear to set your spawn point, make daily backups of world and you'll be fine....

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  • 4 weeks later...

And that helps with your problem how?

You still would need to go outside the game to copy the files, and still won't be able to conveniently load the save before the last save.

As far as i understand the game saves automatically in the background every few seconds (default seems to be 300 seconds, but that may have changed since 1.7, at least the server config page in the wiki seems to be written at that time and there is no other mention of anything with "autosave" in the wiki) and maybe after some major events happening, like death and respawn, but not necessarily every block/player state or change, that command just forces it to do that save at a specific time (but i haven't seen it yet, as i already said it's not in the wiki). You still aren't able to exit without saving completely (at least not without risking the world to become corrupted) and it may even happen that the world files you copied while playing are incomplete or corrupted in other ways (the same, maybe even higher, corruption risk as while you copy, the game might save again).

Therefore i don't think that "HA!" is justified. But if it works for you, good to know.

Btw, if you know more about the command or the games autosave feature in general i'd be happy to read about it, like i said about nothing to find on the topic in the wiki.

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6 hours ago, Hal13 said:

And that helps with your problem how?

 

It is literally what I was looking for: "At least some sort of quicksave mechanism (1-3 slots), just in case something goes awry."

> if you know more about the command or the games autosave feature in general i'd be happy to read about it
Simply used the ingame help to find this command. Know nothing more about it.

Might be something in the mod section though. There are a few world APIs that are helpful in saving custom data, etc.

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On 4/10/2021 at 8:50 AM, Krisch said:

It is literally what I was looking for: "At least some sort of quicksave mechanism (1-3 slots), just in case something goes awry."

But it just triggers the normal autosavefeature (as far as i can see), it's not an actual quicksave (which could be loaded separately and won't get overwritten the next time the autosavefeature gets triggered, which could be after a player gets killed or similar events), or did you mean a game crash with "in case something goes awry"?

In my opinion autosave and quicksave are totally different things.
Nearly all (atm i know only a single one, Starmancer, which doesn't and that's still in really early development, but would benefit massively as often as it crashes when testing) sandbox games have some kind of autosave feature for when the game crashes or similar, often they keep only the last 2 autosaves (the last one and the one before, in case the last one isn't readable) or even only the last one, which may produce problems when the save gets corrupted if the game crashes while saving.
Player triggered separate quicksaves though? Sure i've seen them (nearly never used them though), but often in gameengines, that normally aren't used for sandbox games (Renpy for example), and/or in games, that are intended for pure singleplayer gameplay, I'm kinda sure never to have seen quicksaves in games that even only have the option to be played in multiplayer (but i may be incorrect with that, i'm not actively looking for a quicksave option, like i said i don't really use it anyway, if i can save manually than a regular save is something i do instead, i mean something like this won't happen to me ^_^).

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  • 7 months later...
On 3/7/2021 at 7:02 AM, Krisch said:

I do have a SaveGame, I can load this, can duplicate it, can copy it. It is a persisted world, which is basically a save game. A DB backup is basically a SaveGame IMHO.
There is no technical reason why this is not integrated into the single-player mode of the game. I also think this could be integrated into a mod.

THIS.

I was about to create a new topic, but then I found this one. I definitly would appreciate this feature. To be clear, I don't need or expect a "Quick Save". I just want manual Save/Load system for single player. I do constantly make copies of my save, in case something bad happens. I would have quit playing almost immediately (probably asking a refund) if not for that possibility.

On 4/14/2021 at 8:13 AM, Hal13 said:

did you mean a game crash with "in case something goes awry"?

In my case, it can be anything, like falling and getting minor damage, missing a throw, I accidentally breaking a root, or a corpse yields less loot that I would like. If I had this feature, I'ld definitly abuse it.

On 4/14/2021 at 8:13 AM, Hal13 said:

i mean something like this won't happen to me ^_^).

That's definitly me. That allows me to enjoy a large range of games of genres I suck at.

On 3/7/2021 at 9:43 AM, l33tmaan said:

There isn't one because... the game doesn't need it? 

That depends on the player, If you don't need it, that's fine. For me, and I'm sure, for many others, the game would benefit a lot with this feature.

In fact, the reason I'm still playing is because I have the possibility of creating backups of my save, and load and old one if I need to. I just have to go thorught a bothersome procedure every time. The implementation of this would not add or take away anything, but would improove the quality of life a lot.

On 3/7/2021 at 4:13 PM, Hal13 said:

I assume most VS players played Minecraft, Don't Starve or other similar games before, which only save on exit (or constantly protocol changes to the world and the save on exit only saves the player characters state), to me that seems to be the default for survival games and quite many simulations too. Which could quite likely be the reason that question was never discussed on the forum before...

Minecraft is far easier and predictable, so most people including me are fine with auto-save. This game is much more unforgiving, and decisions have a bigger impact.

On 3/7/2021 at 6:00 AM, Hal13 said:

You can set your respawn point anywhere, why have a quicksave option? There is no gameover, death is only a minor setback.

It is true that the penalty for dyng is minimal (with the right settings), but a lot of the times, if you die is because you are not in a good place in general (no food, shelter,  light sources, etc.). I haven't got to my first winter, but it doesn't seem like I'll have fun if I don't prepare properly. Fortunatly, I can reset my day if I feel like I wasn't productive enough. I just wish the game implemented a system to make something that I'm already allowed to do, in a more convinient fashion.

Edited by Héctor Sobrevilla
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