I'd love to be able to play this game, but...

[synapticpurge]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I was a huge fan of XCOM when it came out and I have been waiting for a suitable successor. The wait is finally over.

I wish I had nothing but praise, but I have to admit I'm befuddled by the lack of save ability during the missions. I am a family man with a full career and several community programs that I am involved in. I have only about 10-15 minutes at a time to steal away for a quick game session. As much as I love the idea of UFO:AI and I think your implementation has otherwise been superb, I'm sorry to say that this is the first game I have ever been unable to play, because it requires a time commitment each time you sit down.

It seems like you've let a really great idea kind of whither. I'm not sure what motivated such an oversight, but I hope you see your way to reason in the future. I'd love to be able to play your game.

[vedrit]

I dont think this was an oversight. While yes, it can be a pain, I think its a good idea.

[Yatta]

afaik it was a game design decision, to avoid players abusing the system by saving the game before an action and reloading if things go bad.

What you can do is setting up actor movement speed to the max (you'll already gain a few seconds per round) and, if the difficulty level you're in permit, try to have a small squad. You dont always need 8 soldiers, and managing only 4 or 5 will make rounds, hence missions, far faster.

[synapticpurge]

Thanks, Yatta, but after playing XCOM, I'm pretty sure no amount of setting tweaks will allow me to get through a recovery on a downed dreadnought in 15 minutes (I wasn't exaggerating about that time limit, I've exceeded it with this post, but I don't think I'll be making another one).

Since my last post, I've looked at some of the other threads and I see that this has been an ongoing discussion. Having worked as a professional applications programmer for several years before becoming an electrical engineer, I'm pretty sure I know exactly the type of persons the developers are and I have no delusions about being able to persuade them to incorporate this feature.

However, as far as the argument about a save being too technically difficult, I have to say, it just doesn't hold water. You have to generate the battlescape and initial actor states when loading a battle from the geoscape. I haven't studied the code in detail, but that process has to originate somewhere. It is just as easy to load data from a save file on disk as it is to generate from hard code.

Furthermore, the game state during the battle at any given time (excluding animation) should be held mostly in memory. Transferring that data to a disk save file and restoring it is, I admit, tedious, but hardly too difficult for developers of sufficient skill to have created a product of this complexity. With the proper design principle in place, once the initial hurdle of incorporating a save feature is overcome, future support comes down to adding a couple lines of code to incorporate new stats as they are added to the game.

As a last thought for mattn, yes, it's your baby, and you can raise it however you like. And if you want to build it around some kind of notion of gamer's honor, well, that's your right. We all have things that are important to us. For me, its spending time with my family and helping the people in my community gain a better life. Games are a nice diversion, but they're not my life. Maybe you should try getting out sometime. Meet  new people. Socialize face to face. Talk to girls with your mouth. You might just find yourself a happier person.

[DiDiT]

_{*cough*stuckuppunk*cough*}

uh... intresting views.

[Chiumanfu]

If battlescape saves were added, I guarantee I'll become savescum as would everyone else.  You know it's true!  This way, it's more exciting.

I find it sad that an applications developer/family man would find it necessary to personally attack a open source developer for coding his game the way he sees fit.  As a developer, you should see by the number of svn commits, how active mattn is and how much work he puts in.  If you really need saves, why don't you write the code.  Just make sure to make your own fork because I really don't want them.   As a family man, you should really just know better.

[Yatta]

Yes yes yes, lets all get out every night, have some alcohol, party & stuff all the time. Wait, someone is actually supposed to spent time working for open source free games to happen ?! Who would have tought that ?!

*enough sarcasm*

After this ... interesting person ... I noticed another one just posted a similar message on the forum (about the saving issue, not the "oh you're so no-life" thing, fortunately).

TBH I think a battlescape save system would really be a plus.
Sure you can save/load whenever something goes wrong ... and sure some player would abuse that (theres already retry abuse anyway), but i think its better to have more active in ufo:ai players than try to avoid people cheating in single player mode. Seriously, why should we care if someone wants to play with cheat in single player ?

Affraid people would give in to temptation ?
I think we can make something :
"Hardcore mode" option, if you choose to start a 'hardcore' campaign, you cant save during missions nor retry on defeat.
The option cant be changed if you have loaded a 'hardcore' game, so you cant change your mind when things turns bad.
Of course, you can save your game on a specific slot only - no "time backup".
Its a little masochistic, but I think I would actually play it. You'll sure take care of what you do with your soldiers !

Maybe still possible to save in battlescape while in hardcore mode : save the game after every action / event, so you can still load if you had to stop playing or had a crash, but cannot go back in time ?

[Duke]

@synapticpurge:
I *officially ignore* your post.

@Yatta:
Unless you come up with a non-exploitable solution (use forum search): NO WAY !

[BTAxis]

Heh, we're STILL talking about this?

[shevegen]

The discussion seems to be a bit too emotional rather than rational.

The devs purposely decided to disallow such an option.

From a rational point of view however, I couldn't see many reasons against at least enabling such a functionality (unless it would be a big burden to maintain the code or otherwise put unreasonable amount of extra works on the devs)
This functionality could be hidden by default and if a player absolutely wants to he could go and enable this with a little effort.

Personally I would always want to play a game how designers decided that it "should" be played.
And then perhaps later, if I would be good, I'd try higher difficulty levels or other strategies and such.

By the way just to make it clear, I don't have a really pro or contra opinion. In general though I tend to prefer allowing flexibility if that is possible.
(And as said, there can be many reasons to disallow flexibility, the "maintaining code" argument would be one reason I can absolutely understand. Less code is usually almost always the better choice than to add more and more complexity and lines of code)

[BTAxis]

It is a matter of code on one hand, but on the other hand no third party contribution of the likes will be accepted into trunk, either. This feature is simply something that has been firmly placed on the "will not do" list. The reasons behind the decision are unimportant at this point, so debating them is a waste of time. This is something people are going to have to accept.

[Vatharian]

There is one quick and dirty solution to this. Limit the saves number per battlescape to one. It's enough, to help those time-constrained, and not enough to exploit the system. Moreover, number of saves can be additionaly lited i.e. to 2 saver per game session - lazyness is best deterrent There are other ways to save a game. For example many standalone programs has been written to save/load WHOLE PROCESSES.
Another way to curcumvent lack of battlscape save ability is to play on a virtual machine. This also prevents exploting save/load duo, as keepeing around 20 5gig+ system copies is just insane. Software like VirtualBox can even use hardware acceleration. Virtual machine can be paused, resumed, saved and hibernated ina any given  point of time.
Enough said.

Instead of nagging developers, as they have ALOT of other work to do, sometimes please sit down and use your brain.