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« on: November 07, 2022, 03:22:07 AM »
A big part of this is that good autosave is serious dev time.
Sure you can write a script that hammers f5 on a timer, but stopping it from trapping you in an unwinnable battle, or interrupting the core gameplay loop is not a trivial task.
Thats before considering that many of the things that can be used to hide saving aren't present in the game - the longest I wait around in an averge game before doing something mechanically relevant is dialogue trees or hyperspace jumps, and both of those are sticking points in the gameplay loop already. There aren't elaborate custcenes to hide save games behind, and the simulationist structure of most of the game makes a lot of the common tricks to hide save/load time less open. The time after the last ship blows up in a space battle seems like the best place, but that has sticking points (oh, I lost a tricked out ship permanantly, and now my save says its gone).
It'd be a great feature for the steam release, but it'd need a slick hidden implementation to make it stick - something like 'save zones' where the game knows nothing important is going to happen (big gap between systems, empty system with no loot, dialogue tree that you can't spam through) to run an autosave, but that really runs counter to the design of the rest of the game.
I'm sure you could build something like that in before 'boss battles' fairly simply - a save before doritos would ease a lot of heartbreak, but it would also give warning for what you go into, which runs counter to a lot of the big moments - that first playthrough where you get blindsided probably shouldn't have tells that people will recognise from other games. The static nature of the core systems could let you build that in when trading too, but it'd take some more work.
An idea is something that rather than trying for a 'pure' save just takes a snapshot of your ships and inventory, then records where you entered the system as a sort of 'restart from here' button where the time has still passed. With other ships/systems being simulated at the same time, that'll have some headaches rolling back the changes you made.
It'll take tweaking a lot of game mechanics, which will then need to be tweaked again as the game's features get more fleshed out. If there is a good implementation in the pipeline I'm all for it, but a bad one will create a lot of tech debt, which means a lot less content overall. An experimental 'this presses F5 once an hour' checkbox seems fairly straightforward, and i'll get behind that, but it also needs a warning next to it along the lines of 'this is experimental and we'll polish it before final release'.
