UFO:Alien Invasion
Technical support => Feature Requests => Topic started by: Mothman on November 28, 2013, 02:06:47 pm
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Sorry to restart an old thread but I would also like to ask for the feature of being able to save during missions. I have just started playing the game but find it very frustrating when I have to leave a game halfway through a mission and thus replay it again (and again and again if it is a long mission and I have little time!)
Possibly just have one slot for in mission games?
The Old thread is at http://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,1310.msg6424.html#msg6424
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It has been discussed to death, and the lack of battle saves is a deliberate design choice, which isn't going to change. If you consistently have problems with long missions, try playing more agressively, and suck up the casualties. Structure your squads to have a mix of experienced troopers, and noob cannon fodder. That's how we did it in UFO :EU, and UFO : AI is all about capturing the essence of the experience.
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Hi Mothman and welcome to these forums :)
WOW, you dug up one of the oldest threads about this topic. There must have been more thatn a dozen of them since 2007. I just wanted to start ranting about doing a forum search first when I noticed that the official post http://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,4948.0.html doesn't contain anything about battlesaves.
1. So my first question is: where would you have expected such an information (that could have kept you from wasting your time posting this question) ?
2. In addition to what TallTroll already said, there is also a technical reason: battlescape status data is very different from geoscape data. The amount of work is equivalent to writing the save routines for a different game.
3. How long do you need for an average battle ?
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Hi Duke
I would have hoped to find the info in the manual.
And having now played for a little while I have managed to cut the battle times down so the saving issue has reduced.
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If some day a code magician appears out of nothing and wants to write saving routines for the battlescape and may reprogram the battlespace itself to allow saving AND want to preserve the original design decision for prevent exploiting the save system, he could set up a single save slot for the actual mission and "just" safe every single advancement within the mission - so the save doesn't saves you from dangerous decisions.
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If some day a code magician appears out of nothing and wants to write saving routines for the battlescape and may reprogram the battlespace itself to allow saving AND want to preserve the original design decision for prevent exploiting the save system, he could set up a single save slot for the actual mission and "just" safe every single advancement within the mission - so the save doesn't saves you from dangerous decisions.
There is no way to prevent exploitation... There is a thing on the computer called "Filesystem". Even we save to a single slot, the player can Alt+Tab and make a copy of the actual state and revert it later.
If we uploaded the state to a server that would make it harder, but then
1. We made the game depend on the internet
2. We would need a server that can handle the data ($$)
3. The player could still find the point where the game uploads the state and terminate the game before (the exploitation hole still exist)
-geever
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So what.
And if you have a VM running, you can snapshot every move. And rewind to where ever you want, throwing away all random-mess, or not depending on the randomizer used.
If you have to copy your file on every step you done so far, its already a pain in the butt. If you store some global additional indicator data at some places in the game unrelated to the slot, and overwrite this thing like every 5 seconds even when idle (and of course when leaving the game) you need 4 files to save after every step. This reference might such simple thing like the number of all intermediate safes since the mission starts. Connect it with the random number generator outputs (its seed saved with the mission data and randomly chosen at game starts) you can't even do the exact same move repeatedly for getting different results, but have to do another thing (though you might want to do another thing anyway). What if that random generator choose where to write and read the reference out of 30 unrelated files (like mapdata, the executable etc.). Then you have to overwatch the file system very carefully... or have to mod your safe game mechanism...
There is something called convenience. The magician may design the safe system convenient for breaks and inconvenient for safes on regular basis - and that might be good enough. :-)
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Wrinting that 'reference data' to 'unrelated' ufo files would certainly confuse both MAKE and GIT.
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I always thought we don´t have battlescape saves by design, not for technical reasons.
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Treu, but it never hurts to also know all about the technical aspects.
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I don't think any of that reference data defence is needed anyway. Defending or even thinking of preventing "to hack the game" actively is IMHO a waste of time. All I WANT to say is that the design decision not to save within maps for micro-replay is not broken by a save mechanism to continue. If its to cost intensive (manpower, redesign problems) to implement one - well - I perfectly understand that... ;)
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and yet another time: I don't know the reason of others - but the reason why I didn't write this yet, is because I don't like it. Games need game overs, games must be challenging, I hate these casual game aspects. So the reason why it's not there is that nobody on the team cares about writing it - because in our opinion it would suck. And as I've said earlier already: UFOAI is opensource - do whatever you want with it. We would even add it to the mainline, just not enabled by default. We will never ever (at least not in the current teams mindset - correct me when I'm wrong) write this on our own. But we wouldn't care if anyone else would.
And of course there are ways to still exploit it with VMs - but honestly... if anyone wants to exploit a game, he will find a way - but why should we care about those? In the first view we are making a game for ourselves and for having fun while doing and playing it. And in general we only include features we believe in.
EOF
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Well said.
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:-) Okok. At the end - it is your game.
I really would like to write: "challenge accepted", but I also really have no time to do so, even for try to contribute coding in smaller ways. :-(
Maybe I come back to this ... topic, when I have more time, and done some smaller work for the project.
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well, if you fucked up you can just click the retry mission button and spend all day to not loose anyone. or you can quicksave before the mission starts and auto-resolve. and if you didn't like it, load and auto-resolve again and again.. and again...
well i managed to not loose anyone by some random alien coming around a corner 50 miles away and taking 200 shots at me with their seemingly endless amount of TUs. just took me some time. so whether or not you add saves, there is a save, it's just not convenient.
that VM save state thing is a nice idea though. would take definitely less time than play mansion_huge 30 times over
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and yet another time: I don't know the reason of others - but the reason why I didn't write this yet, is because I don't like it. Games need game overs, games must be challenging, I hate these casual game aspects. So the reason why it's not there is that nobody on the team cares about writing it - because in our opinion it would suck. And as I've said earlier already: UFOAI is opensource - do whatever you want with it. We would even add it to the mainline, just not enabled by default. We will never ever (at least not in the current teams mindset - correct me when I'm wrong) write this on our own. But we wouldn't care if anyone else would.
And of course there are ways to still exploit it with VMs - but honestly... if anyone wants to exploit a game, he will find a way - but why should we care about those? In the first view we are making a game for ourselves and for having fun while doing and playing it. And in general we only include features we believe in.
EOF
Being new to this forum I didn't know that you were only making this game for your own amusement. I assumed that someday you would want to put it on the market. If the above is true then you certainly can do what ever you wish and any critical comments are absolutely out of place. Since I am completely unqualified to contribute to your effort in any way and any comments I might make would only be my opinion and not at all relevant to your personal goal of 'having fun'.
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I assumed that someday you would want to put it on the market.
This is an open source game. That means (roughly) anyone can do what they want with it. Open source means it is already released to the "market".
If you mean selling the game, I don't believe that was ever the intention. Personally I would say that your implication of "putting it on the market" would mean at some point making it Closed Source which is completely against the concept of Open Source.
Since I am completely unqualified to contribute to your effort in any way and any comments I might make would only be my opinion and not at all relevant to your personal goal of 'having fun'.
Why do you suggest you are completely unqualified to contribute?
The aim of the game being Open Source means that any can contribute to making the game better. You can provide ideas, and if the development team believe that it is worth spending the time to code, will implement it.
Alternatively, if they don't agree with it or don't consider it a priority then you can code it yourself, or find a friend who can, and the changes can be submitted for consideration for inclusion into the "official" project. Alternatively, you could maintain a seperate alternative version of the game with your own features. The project is "Open" to all these options.
If the above is true then you certainly can do what ever you wish and any critical comments are absolutely out of place.
Even if the game were being developed towards a "completion" point and sale, the developers are still allowed their opinion on how they think the game mechanics should operate. I don't see why them being able to do what they wish is dependent on whether the game is available for sale or not?? o.O
Critical comments however, are not out of place. If they are constructive then they can be helpful. If they are not constructive, or don't fit with the vision of the devs, then they can be happily ignored.
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IMO, the main value of battlescape saving support would be as optional debug functionality.
But why not to allow it at "Easiest" level? :)
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There are some missions that need at least several hours - namely attacks on alien bases. (If you are faster, you loose too many units. Starting strategy is too wait on the entrance ramp, covered in smoke, waiting for aliens to show up & kill.) Not being able to save there is a pain.
Not allowing saves because people should be afraid is kind of a futile attempt. Look at other games. For instance, Battle for Wesnoth also didn't allow saving during scenarios (=missions) in the past, but it's long gone as it wasn't really worth it.
In UFO:AI's case, you are making it way too hard to reproduce in-missions bugs and cause the game to be unstable in return, basically.
Of course, if the real reason is that it needs to be implemented somehow, that's a completely different matter.
EDIT
And btw, serious players disallow themselves saveload exploitation anyway. I never do within scenarios in BfW, though it's technically possible.
Thinking about it, I even don't saveload at the beginning of UFO:AI missions (where it's possible)... Not because of loosing units however.