Show "times loaded" in mission statistics

[darksilence]

First of all, thank you to everyone who made The Dark Mod possible.

I'm a fan of the original Thief games, who waited for years for the sequel that never really came, and discovering TDM recently has been amazing. My wait for the Thief sequel is over; this is it. I'm having a blast playing it, and I cannot thank everyone enough. I'm now learning DarkRadiant and I hope that one day I can give something back to this amazing community. 

Really, thank you everyone :)

Now, without further introduction, I just wanted to make a small suggestion: what are your thoughts regarding showing "times loaded" at the end of the mission, instead of (or in addition to) "times saved"? I always play trying to load as little as possible (or not at all), and having this metric would be great.

[Bienie]

Welcome to the forums!

 

That would be a cool addition for those who like to do Ironman-type challenges. I once toyed with the idea of making one of the difficulties non-loadable from saves to force an ironman scenario, but decided against it. As far as how complicated this particular feature would be to implement, I have no idea, but if it's easy enough I say we should go for it!

Edited March 12, 2020 by Bienie

[demagogue]

I assume the load would have to re-save the save game itself. I suppose that's not a problem in principle. 

[VanishedOne]

Or create/update a supplementary save file that just contains the number of loads. (That should avoid having to work out what to do about multiple save files, and ensure save/load-related bugs weren't made harder to diagnose.)

[demagogue]

Yeah that makes sense, a file that has the name of the FM and number of loads in the "current game" that clears the value when the FM is started or completed.

I mean it's prone to manipulation, or you'd have to be careful.

If it clears when you start over, then you could start a game, save and reload a bunch of times, then right towards the end, you just start a new game and then reload the last one and your load count is "1". Or you don't let it reset the counter when you start over, then it keeps adding to the number over multiple games. Or you let the player decide when the counter is "restarted", but then they just manipulate it directly.

If it clears only when you complete it, then no matter how many games you play from the start, they all keep adding to the load count until the FM is completed, which could cover multiple games too.

Seems like it's harder to count than just saves. But anyway, you'd want to think carefully how to make the system.

It's probably not that hard to figure out, just you want to cover all of these kinds of situations.

I feel like starting over should clear the count, but then you shouldn't be able to abuse it to reload from another game. And I feel like most players should be allowed to reload from another game. So my idea is that, if someone does reload from another game after restarting, it should set the load count to "undefined (reloading branched)", or whatever term is best for the job. So if you are really trying to ironman it, you'll get a valid stat, and if you don't really care then you get "undefined", but that should be fine for them since if they're doing it at all they already don't care. That's my thinking on it now.

Well another option is that each "starting from game start" could be given a unique code that attaches to the saves from that trunk, and the reload count is attached to that code, so you're not forking the playthru (restart and reload from another game), you're just moving from game 2 back to game 1's count. Maybe that's best.

[VanishedOne]

Hmm, more complex than I anticipated. I suppose another possibility would be to give each save file its own supplementary file, but at that point the number of proposed files is growing quite a bit, all for the sake of a feature that only benefits those wanting evidence of their ironman playthroughs.

I don't think deliberate manipulation by players is worth worrying about, though: if you want to cheat you have plenty of options. Activate godmode and notarget from the console. Edit the mission map file. Edit the GUI. Recompile the engine. Edit your screenshot in an image editor. So to a substantial extent it'll remain an honour system in any event.

Fun fact about D3BFG's achievement-tracking code: it disables achievements if you have the console enabled, but only performs the check at the moment you meet the criteria for an achievement. Nothing stops you making keybinds for cheat modes.

[darksilence]

To keep it simple, I like the idea of a file with the number of times loaded for a particular mission.

If a mission is restarted, the count for that particular mission resets to zero.

Every time the user loads, the counter in the file for the corresponding mission is incremented. This way, loading from "another save" would still count as one more load for that particular mission.

I am fine with the idea of a honor system, but something like simple encryption and some obfuscation for the counter file could also help (this would at least deter some users from the temptation of modifying that file, I doubt they'd go through that much hassle to tamper the system).