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Discussion / Re: I'd love to be able to play this game, but...
« on: March 22, 2010, 04:21:57 pm »
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.
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.