A more reliable autosave

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All Forums >> [Current Games From Matrix.] >> [Science Fiction] >> Starships Unlimited v3 >> A more reliable autosave

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A more reliable autosave - 1/23/2003 11:28:47 PM

EricLarsen

Posts: 458
Joined: 7/9/2002
From: Salinas, CA Raider Nation
Status: offline

After having my first bad saved-game file I discovered that the autosave did a miserable job of providing a reliable backup in case of a serious problem. After playing for 7 hours straight one night I discovered that not once did the autosave trigger to save my game. It did trigger the night before, but that save was several hundred years behind the times and it wasn't worth restarting my game from that point.

I did find out what triggers an autosave though, and that is 5 minutes of unpaused gameplay. I don't know about the rest of you fellow SUDG players but that just isn't a reliable enough autosave trigger for me and my style of play. Early in a game when there's little going on I can get an autosave in once in a long while, but when I get into the antimatter age and I've got multiple worlds and many ships I have trouble going 30 seconds, much less 5 minutes, without pausing the action and seeing what's up. When I'm in the middle of a combat and some ship signals it's awaiting orders I hit the pause button so I can order that ship on it's way and then return to the combat before it's finished, otherwise if I leave it unpaused the combat will finish up before I ever get a chance to get back to that combat that was interrupted. When I get some interruption in the game I always pause and check it out and then use that berak to check out other stuff as well.

I sure hope that SUDG players who have had similar problems with the autosave not saving regularly and not saving their bacon when something fatal happens will give voice to wanting a more reliable autosave with a more reliable trigger. If the autosave is tied to the system clock then why not have it save every 15 minutes or so, or have it save every 50 years of gameplay or so. SUDG needs to have the same kind of reliably triggered autosave that every other game has, not one that is unreliable at best and has a trigger that may or may not get activated. :cool:
Eric Larsen

Post #: 1

- 1/23/2003 11:32:13 PM

Scorpiuscat

Posts: 9
Joined: 1/21/2003
Status: offline

I agree, I try to always save my game periodically, but this game tends to suck you in and before you know it, several hours have passed.

(in reply to EricLarsen)

Post #: 2

- 1/24/2003 2:30:31 AM

MikeRutemeyer

Posts: 4
Joined: 1/20/2003
Status: offline

So far, I have not depended upon the autosave feature - this more from my experience with other games that supposedly autosaved. Rather than depending upon a conditional trigger (which can involve mutliple, time- consuming reprogramming fixes for the design team) perhaps simply use the PC clock to tigger that function irrespective of what is happening within the game. With the relative cycle speed of today's PCs, I doubt the gamer would even notice any appreciable slow-down.

A really nice feature would be to have it gamer selectable (e.g. every five minutes, ten minutes, or whatever).

(in reply to EricLarsen)

Post #: 3

- 1/24/2003 6:37:12 AM

dragoniv

Posts: 60
Joined: 1/10/2003
From: Albany, NY
Status: offline

not hard to tell I mix my games up with taking care of my kids and doing remote office work, eh? must be why my autosaves are golden--and my games take FOREVER (well, 3-5 days anyway).

(in reply to EricLarsen)

Post #: 4

- 1/24/2003 10:17:50 AM

zaz

Posts: 9
Joined: 1/20/2003
Status: offline

I've been lucky enough not to run into the problem of a bad save file yet.

I can agree that an auto-save feature should be game play time based without the pause getting in the way of the save unless the game has remained paused. 50 years would be a good trigger to save, but this is something that players should be able to configure. 25, 50, 100, 200 years would be fine options.

To combat the corrupting files, we could have the game backup the file being over wrote. A simple file copy before the save would be enough to allow players to recover from a critical file save.

(in reply to EricLarsen)

Post #: 5