Why is the "saved game during combat" thread locked?

[Branes]

You decided a long time ago that you didn't want players doing the "kill an alien, save the game, Xcom thing."
So what? Why should YOU care how a person plays the game? Maybe I don't have umpteen thousand hours of playing time to constantly restart the game after my team gets wiped. What gives you the right to tell people how to play? You design a game based on Xcom and it's gameplay, yet you keep out one of the most useful features of the game because YOU want to insure that a person can't make it easier to succeed. That's despotic.

I'm getting the impression that you developers just don't want to hear what your playing audience wants.
Not allowing saves during a very long tedious turn based combat sequence is foolish to the extreme and frankly smacks of controlling behavior. What you game developers don't seem to understand is that saving and restoring is the ONLY way some people are capable of winning a game, either that or outright cheating. Not everyone has the same gaming abilities.
And if you don't allow saves during combat AND limit the number of replacement soldiers available afterwards, you have essentially doomed the player to failure after the first team wipeout. Or worse, they have to continually replay the same combat scenario until they get a favorable outcome. That is not only stupid, it's cruel. And for me it's a serious deal breaker.

Some of us, don't have time to replay a combat sequence every time we have a computer crash or in my case, power outage since I live in central Florida, one of the most active electrical storm areas in the world. It's a shame really, because I was beginning to enjoy the game. It is one of the best Xcom derived games I've played, and I've played just about all of them. Unlike most, you've managed to capture the suspenseful feeling of the original, something that is missing from most spinoffs. Unfortunately, without a save game feature in the battlescape mode, I will not continue to play this game...or yours.

And by the way, I'm not some angry teen. I've been playing computer games since first playing Pong in a bar in Okinawa in 1971.

[geever]

What gives you the right to tell people how to play?

Did we tell you? I don't think so.

You design a game

Dot. No more. We design it and we know how we want it to work. (It gives us the right to do as we want.)

But let me ask you a question: What gives you the right to tell us how to write the game?
You're a player? It doesn't mean you have rights on design.

Anyway combat doesn't take so long you cannot finish it. If you have power cuts so often you should get some special power supply.

-geever

[Destructavator]

geever is right - on all counts from where I stand.

This project isn't a democracy, although it is open-source and released under a nice, liberal GPL license that allows you to alter it yourself any way you please, including making changes that you would want even though they wouldn't be in an official release.

No one here is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to play this game - With regards to the "deal-breaker" you mentioned, if you are really dissatisfied with the game as it is and unhappy to play it, you're welcome to ask for a full refund of what you paid for it.

Also as geever pointed out:  If you're in Florida, you're in the United States of America like myself, and you can easily get a battery backup/surge protection system which you should probably have anyways if power failure is such an issue where you live.

If you can't find one locally, you can order some very good ones:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=20&srkey=battery%20backup

APC is a very good brand, giving virtually no interruption in power whatsoever and very reliable as far as these things go.  I have one myself, it lasts for more than an hour in a blackout and wasn't very expensive.

I hope you now understand why that thread was locked - There isn't any magical combination of words you could post that would likely change what has been established as a final decision on the matter.

[Imposeren]

How about making a little democracy just by "custom difficulty" where player can chose starting money, happyness, debts, and ability to save during missions.

I think that this, if agreed, should be very low priority "feature"

[Winter]

It won't be agreed. Personally I wouldn't mind an optional in-battle save feature (disabled by default), but Mattn is adamant, and I'll continue to support him in that decision. There will be no battlescape saving in any official release of UFO:AI.

As everyone else has said, feel free to code it -- you can even put the patch all over the forums. Just stop whinging at us for it.

Regards,
Winter

[geever]

I won't explain it in detail but it would be quite difficult to make it technically and we don't wanna write AND maintain that code. I guess that is why mattn (and myself) is against it.

-geever

[Destructavator]

How about making a little democracy just by "custom difficulty" where player can chose starting money, happyness, debts, and ability to save during missions.

I think that this, if agreed, should be very low priority "feature"

Saving in combat just won't be implemented in an official release, no matter what anyone says, arguing about that fact is pointless, but with regards to these other aspects of a "custom difficulty" as you mentioned, all you have to do is edit the .ufo files.

The .ufo files are in plain English, read by the game every time it starts, and can be modified with any common text editor (including Windows notepad or wordpad), and don't require any programming knowledge to work with.

In the .ufo files you can play with most stats and such of the game, including difficulty and what the player starts with.

The .ufo files also allow changing how weapons are balanced, researched, etc., how aircraft work, etc., enough to almost build a new game with enough work, or at least a new campaign.

[Duke]

Branes,
you may also want to read this post about it:
http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=3147.msg21518#msg21518

[odie]

Hi Barnes,

And welcome to the game first.

I thnk u have not explained where u r coming from, other than the fact that u commented on the lack of save / load feature within the battles (known as battlescape on UFOAI).

We also do not know what experience u have from UFOAI (Neither the versions u have played, the platform u r on, nor the kind of gaming experience u have).

U have been playing games since 1971, so have i from 1984. Yet, though ppl may start gaming earli or later, they might simply end up having a reverse amount of experience not-relative to the years of gaming experience.

For example, i do not boast that i play every game there is out there, but its RPG, i have played almost every single darn chinese and english main stream RPGs out there. Including 4x strategy esp for space science genres.

And neither do we wan to thnk or assume everyone who post a thread like yours are punks. What makes u thnk so? A sense of insecurities or simply bad experience on other forums? Pls do not dismiss anyone off on a new forum u r on, (considering u put up post entry nos 1 only). Its not fair to the many good men and women here.


Back to game mechanics:

I have encountered many types of play designs, including the ones where u can save every turn, in and out of combat, to those tat u can not even save until one darn major stage is completed.

I see ppl complain but yet still play on even paying for em. Maybe u thnk this is open source and freeware, hence u can push things thru the way u want it.

Open source simply means that its free for all to grab, modify and distribute in a sense. It however does not mean developers must follow everyone's way who is making a suggestion.

They still have their designs, concepts, and implementations, but open for all to see - their codes, so that bugs, experience can be enhanced / corrected. It also makes the project transparant, so that all can understand the codes (if they are trained to do so, or training themselves to be able to do so).

Hence, many open source projects (including even mozilla firefox) have spins offs..... like firefox for ubuntu etc, by hardcore fans.

Point here is: All open source programs (including a game proj like this UFOAI) are for all to see, use and deploy. They are also free to modify and 'MOD'ded into a version they like. Ppl are free to contribute to the development of the project and free to continue modding it and suggesting changes.

If u like it, good, enjoy and progress with it. If u dun like it, study it, and change it and suggest it.

Hope this does not sound like another -tell-you-off- reply, but that it will be received in good light. I am having a splitting headache too, so my english may be off standards today too.

Feel free to clarify points and enjoy the projects and the uniqueness of the features ok? And no, pls dun start a flaming war here though, again though i would give u the benefit of the doubt that u commented becos u love the proj, and hope it will be the way u preferred it to be, though not all wants and desires can be met here, becos of the HUGE community.

Toodles.

[Branes]

Odie,
Thank you for your thoughtful and respectful response.

As I said, my gaming experience goes back to days before PC's even existed. I was in Okinawa in late 1971 on R&R from Vietnam when I saw a strange looking machine in a bar in Koza. I was called Pong and was being tested by a company called Atari. After waiting a considerable amount of time,  because it was extremely popular,  I was able to play it and became immediately hooked. It had just been delivered a couple of days earlier. I had been a board game player for many years, but this, this was something unique. So, I can say confidently that I am one of the first hundred or so Americans to EVER play any video game at any time. And I have been playing them since the introduction of the Atari VCS later known as the 2600. I've had computers of every kind including the Timex Sinclair, Commodore Vic 20, Atari 400, Atari 800XKL, Amiga 500 and 2500, one old classic one piece Mac, and PC's dating back to the Compaq 8088 portable which I still have. It has a 10MB hard drive and uses 2 5 1/4" floppy drives with Dos 3.3. and still boots BTW...so much for the Y2K bug. As you can probably guess, I'm in my late 50's and retired.

There are two sides to this issue. Those that like the idea of a battlescape save and those that think the game is better without it. But actually, that's only one side, because those who don't like it, don't have to use it. They can play ironman if they want. And that's the nature of the right to choice. And that's what the developers are depriving us of as players. The right to choose how we want to play. In some games, like Tetris, or video oriented games that's not a big issue, But in a turn-based strategy game where every move could result in losing a squad or a couple of players you've taken time to develop, it becomes important.
 
I've read other comments where the developers decided they wanted you to have to do things a certain way..lose players you become attached to, operate under a handicap. It's their game, they have the right to impose whatever limitations they want on the game. But frankly, I'm not going to subject myself to being placed in a gamer's box, so i guess I'm just going to have to look elsewhere for my entertainment. Good luck to everyone.

But I'm just going to say one thing..this IS a free, open source game, but were it commercial and the developers had this attitude, it would fail miserably.

Feel free to lock this thread also. I won't be returning to respond to any comments.

[geever]

.... I saw a strange looking machine in a bar in Koza. I was called Pong and was being tested by a company called Atari.

Could you save in Pong?


Anyway games have rules. You should know that if you're a veteran player. And yes, this rule makes it more difficult but also more interesting. There is nothing more boring than a too easy game.

If you can't save you have to think more. "Can I do that without risking my men's life?", "How could I kill that alien..." Much more fun!
With saving you can simply play trial&error which is miserable..

But I'm just going to say one thing..this IS a free, open source game, but were it commercial and the developers had this attitude, it would fail miserably.

miserable, again..

-geever

[Troberg]

Though I don't need to save in a mission for gameplay reasons, there are two possible reasons I can think of which I have not seen yet:

* Bugs. Several times when playing the game, I've been dropped out of the game or had to abandon a mission due to bugs. I don't complain about the bugs per se, they are to be expected in a game under development (to be quite honest, some of them probably comes from playing on a laptop, which, as laptops typically are, is prone to overheating), but it kind of sucks when you've spent two hours on a mission and your remaining troopers get stuck in a staircase or the game locks up. Being able to save occasionally would help mitigate that.

* Bug fixing. I work with development, and when a customer has a problem, it's much easier to fix if you can duplicate it. Being able to post a savegame so that a developer can reproduce a bug in his development environment would cut down a lot on tedious bug searching.

I just wanted to put those argument forward, in order to enlarge the view to cover what I believe is previously undiscussed terrain.

[Winter]

But I'm just going to say one thing..this IS a free, open source game, but were it commercial and the developers had this attitude, it would fail miserably.

Honestly, I doubt that. After all, EA are still in business.

We're making a game that people seem to agree is fun to play, on many different levels. That's good enough for me.

Regards,
Winter

[BTAxis]

I don't understand why people keep whining about the battlescape save as if we're infringing on a basic human right. There are quite simply two reasons why it's not going to happen: we don't really want it and it's a coding nightmare. The first is an opinion we're not going to change our minds on, the second isn't even a matter of opinion.
So yeah, people can either live with the situation, or... not, I guess.

[ralthor]

Offtopic, but quick question, Are all the .ufo files generated manually?  Does UFO Radiant create or edit them?