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Author Topic: Suspend option during battlescape?  (Read 4099 times)

Offline postmanmanman

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Suspend option during battlescape?
« on: June 27, 2012, 03:53:56 am »
First off: just want to say I just discovered this game today. I recently started playing Jagged Alliance 2 after getting it in a GoG sale, and somehow it got me interested in X-Com. I decided to try this, since, well, it's free and has a cleaner UI... and I'm thoroughly impressed! I've been playing it all day and having a lot of fun.

Anyways, I've read multiple times that the game doesn't allow saving in the battlescape to prevent save-scumming tactics. I support that fully, and it adds to the tension in a reasonable, fair way. However... some of these battles take a good chunk of time. I just had one that lasted some 45 minutes. (Damn maze-like mansion...) I think there needs to be some way to suspend progress so that, if you get interrupted mid-battle, you don't need to sacrifice all that progress. I'd recommend a system in which saving during a battle boots you out of the game, and when you next load up that save, it's then deleted. This means that, short of hunting the files down and copying them, you can't use this save method to cheat, only to suspend and resume progress.

Oh, and while I'm here, another quick question... is there any way to detect general alien locations in the battlescape? It's pretty frustrating to reach a point where I've killed all the visible aliens and then I'm stuck spending several turns just hunting for the last few.

Offline H-Hour

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2012, 10:01:05 am »
None of the coding infrastructure is in place for saving on the battlescape. In order to implement this, someone would have to identify, store and recall every piece of information on the battlescape.

None of the core developers are interested in battlescape saving and so they're not interested in doing this work, but they've indicated on several occassions that they're not opposed to integrating a system similar to what you've described if someone decided to do it.

Offline geever

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2012, 10:06:16 am »
Hmmm, the latter is not fully true. Even if someone else does the battlescape saving, integrating it to the game would mean WE should maintain and fix incompatibilities happen. So I say it can only live as a MOD.

-geever

Offline postmanmanman

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #3 on: June 28, 2012, 02:06:13 pm »
Oh, duh... of course there wouldn't be any groundwork for saving during battles. I'm a bit dumb at times.

Disappointing, though. They can last a good while.

Offline Mattn

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #4 on: June 28, 2012, 06:26:07 pm »
quake2 has a feature for this - you can save the entity states and restore them. but for ufoai one would also have to save the rma stuff and so on. if you really would like to implement such a feature, you should check out q2 and see how they did it.

Offline geisthund

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #5 on: June 29, 2012, 05:46:55 pm »
well given that the map features are not deformable, the only variables to save are the location and health / ammo statuses of all player and AI units on the field, no?

Offline kurja

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #6 on: June 29, 2012, 05:50:10 pm »
well given that the map features are not deformable, the only variables to save are the location and health / ammo statuses of all player and AI units on the field, no?

random map assembly?

Offline geisthund

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Re: Suspend option during battlescape?
« Reply #7 on: July 01, 2012, 03:00:53 am »
oh yeah. forgot about that...