[Resolved in TDM 2.04] Quicksaving

[SteveL]

We're planning to change the quicksave facility so that you always have more than 1 quicksave available for reloading. That'll address the problem of the occasional corrupt or badly-timed save making you restart a mission.

There are a couple of options:

• We have a quicksave A and quicksave B. When you quicksave, the game would overwrite the older of the two. F9 will reload the most recent one.
• Quicksaves never get overwritten. They always generate a new file, called something like MissionName_2_Aug_2015_141022.save. This would generate more save files, and the player would be responsible for deleting any that they don't want to keep.

Any preferences?

[Bikerdude]

Contemporary games as far as I am aware just have 1 quick save, but multiple normal saves which are named and time stamped. If this isnt acheavable then just keep all the quick and normal saves named after the FM they are related to with time stamps.

 

I would just like to say I have never had an issue with the existing save system.

[SteveL]

  On 8/2/2015 at 1:30 PM, Bikerdude said:

I would just like to say I have never had an issue with the existing save system.

 

I've never had a corrupt save either, but we do get reports. I occasionally hit F5 when I'm about to die and mean to hit F9, so I'd like this feature to make up for my brain farts

 

The system you describe sounds like what we already have. Maybe I should have added a poll option for "don't change it".

[Bikerdude]

Heh, the two-q_save option in that case sounds like a prudent idea.

[161803398874989]

I'd go for the first option. I don't like clutter on my computer.

[Destined]

I also think the 2 quicksave option is better. I also have not experienced any problems in TDM, but in other games I have often lost at least a couple of hours by corrupt/badly timed quicksafes. The "hitting F5 instead of F9" is also not unknown to me...

[Gast]

Getting rid of this corruption problem would be great since it happens quite regularly on my computer.

[wesp5]

I also think the two quick saves solution should be enough. This is the way Half-Life does it...

[HMart]

First option for sure. Like Bikerdude never add any problem saving but more options and safeguards is never a bad thing.

[jaxa]

Didn't we add an option to have mappers disable saves? Has any mapper used that yet?

[demagogue]

I vote the 2 save option, since I've bloated on FM saves before as it is and happy it wasn't more.

 

I had qs fail only one time, or just freeze up, but it was awful.

 

The stats screen counts saves, so I'd hope it still properly counts the qsaves, or at least as good as it does now.

[NagaHuntress]

If the size of save games were in the order of kilobytes, keeping unlimited quicksaves might be okay, but TDM's quicksaves are megabytes in size, so I can see the save driectory bloating up quickly if one has a habit of quicksaving.

 

Having N quicksaves in rotation is a good idea, as it avoids having a bad quicksave ruin your day. Having N configurable would be nice, but I suspect N=2 will satisfy most people.

[Oldjim]

An effective backup quicksave is an excellent idea as I have occasionally had the corrupted save problem with a few games - I can't remember which ones as it was with an earlier version of TDM - to the extent that I started using manual saves as well on those games. But I haven't done that at all since TDM 2.03 came out including beta testing

[fllood]

Currenty I use the below option of five quicksaves, reloading the latest with this script in an autoexec of the darkmod root folder.

Works perfect for my need.

I'm fine with anything as long as the autoecec solution won't be broken,

 

If you intend to incorporate an enhanced quicksave solution in the TDM codebase I though vote for the first, but would prefer to have 3 or 5 quicksaves than but two, That would make the autoexec appoach redundant for good.

 

// === Multiple Quicksaves ===

// Quicksave altering

set save1 "savegame QuickSave1; set savebind vstr save2; set loadbind vstr load1"

set save2 "savegame QuickSave2; set savebind vstr save3; set loadbind vstr load2"

set save3 "savegame QuickSave3; set savebind vstr save4; set loadbind vstr load3"

set save4 "savegame QuickSave4; set savebind vstr save5; set loadbind vstr load4"

set save5 "savegame QuickSave5; set savebind vstr save1; set loadbind vstr load5"

set savebind vstr save1

bind f9 "vstr savebind"

set load1 "loadgame QuickSave1"

set load2 "loadgame QuickSave2"

set load3 "loadgame QuickSave3"

set load4 "loadgame QuickSave4"

set load5 "loadgame QuickSave5"

set loadbind vstr load1

bind f12 "vstr loadbind"

[SteveL]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. It's pretty clear that no-one enjoys tidying up manually I'll see whether we've got space on a menu for setting the number of quicksaves, because it'd keep maximum flexibility but would probably be a little-used feature.

[SteveL]

  On 8/3/2015 at 12:13 AM, jaxa said:

Didn't we add an option to have mappers disable saves? Has any mapper used that yet?

 

Yes, Obsttorte added mapper control of saving in the most recent release. No, no-one's built a checkpoint-save map yet. The new system would work with both that and with the mission stats (which just count the number of times a save has happened and store it with the other mission objective information).

[SteveL]

  On 8/3/2015 at 3:43 PM, SteveL said:

I'll see whether we've got space on a menu for setting the number of quicksaves, because it'd keep maximum flexibility but would probably be a little-used feature.

On second thoughts, rather than shoehorn in another menu option, we can make this a cvar that gets remembered between map loads. Sound ok?

[SteveL]

I've implemented the cvar. The save game code is in the engine framework, so the cvar is a com_ one, com_numSaveGames. It defaults to 2.

I didn't have to write any date-handling code The engine already has the facility to give you a list of save games sorted by date descending: that's what's use by the load game menu. It also has a facility to find an unused file name, so all this tweak does when saving is: look through the sorted list of saves and count the number of quicksaves, and if there are too many already, the last (oldest) one that it saw gets overwritten. If there aren't too many, it generates an unused filename beginning Quicksave, e.g. Quicksave_0 or Quicksave_1 (adjusted for language/l18n). When loading, it just finds the first (most recent) matching save, or if there aren't any quicksaves it gives you the same console error that you get now.

This method will never *reduce* the number of quick saves that you have for a mission. If you create 5, then reduce the cvar to 3, it'll just overwrite the oldest each time, so you'll keep 5.

File timestamps don't include fractional seconds, so the game can choose the "wrong" file if you tap F5 several times in one second. But that won't be a problem in practice. The overwritten file will always be one that you created that second.

[wesp5]

Okay, as the main discussion seems to be over I'll hijack this thread for some other issue which is not really related : When I was downloading new missions yesterday I wanted to do so in the background and tried alt-tabbing out of TDM to the desktop on Windows 7. It did not work well, the brightness was all messed up and the mouse locked! I ended up playing a mission at the same time which did work, but can those alt-tabbing problems be fixed? Or am I missing some trick?

Edited August 4, 2015 by wesp5

[SteveL]

You should start a new thread so people can find it

[Destined]

I agree with SteveL. If you have a new topic, you should start a new thread. But anyways: alt-tabbing is alsways problematic with TDM and as far as I know it is not possible (at least not easily) to fix it. There actually has been a discussion on this problem. Don't know the name of the thread, though. Just search for it.

Edited August 4, 2015 by Destined

[Oldjim]

It was discussed when beta testing the latest version and it just doesn't work properly or indeed at all

[esme]

I've never had a problem with the single quicksave mechanism, well except the time I accidentally quicksaved instead of restoring just as I got killed but that was my fault, so of the options the 2 quicksave system please

[wesp5]

  On 8/4/2015 at 10:16 AM, Oldjim said:

It was discussed when beta testing the latest version and it just doesn't work properly or indeed at all

That's enough as an answer. I feared as much and didn't want to open a new thread if it already was a known unsolvable issue...

[SteveL]

For my part I think it's definitely worth discussing. I don't remember any previous discussion of what the problem is or what we'd have to do to get it to work. I only remember discussions around the fact that it doesn't, and about workarounds. I do have a workaround but it would be nice just to alt+tab. NagaHuntress recently gave us a patch to make it work right on Linux. I don't know the issues on Windows, but there are likely people on the forum who do and could give us a start.