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General Discussion / Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« on: October 05, 2022, 02:59:47 AM »
To be fair, sensibilities have changed over time, and autosave is something many will simply expect in 2022.
I do not personally find it a big deal (having developed a habit of hitting F5 regularly at appropriate times over the years), but not doing something about this before a steam release would be a bad idea, as a nontrivial number of people will likely assume it saves for you and not do so manually.
It is really more of a polish feature though, and may be somewhat annoying without some optimization of the save process. Background saves are also likely enough work that there is incentive to have a complete game before doing this.
That is extra true if it is related to the memory leak, and a save routine like this is a very obvious place a reference to an object can persist too long and cause what is essentially a memory leak. Running the base game with the only changes being to settings to disable the flash on kill and allow 240fps (which it works fine at), and pausing and tabbing out rather than closing it, I can get through most of a campaign before it must be restarted. That is not bad at all, but if there is a 15 minute autosave and that contributes, it may come much sooner.
Compression is likely to be part of that as well. It can be done in two different ways, either generating text and asking that it be compressed, or internally maintaining a compression table and using binary tokens (I tend to use a standard here, so you can get json with gzip decompression or similar, but custom formats are also common). While the latter is much more efficient, it is also the kind of thing that programmers tend to like to do last if the specs are not very clear going in.
My guess is this is part of the full release, but we see better save handling after saved games start having an expectation of being compatible through releases.
I do not personally find it a big deal (having developed a habit of hitting F5 regularly at appropriate times over the years), but not doing something about this before a steam release would be a bad idea, as a nontrivial number of people will likely assume it saves for you and not do so manually.
It is really more of a polish feature though, and may be somewhat annoying without some optimization of the save process. Background saves are also likely enough work that there is incentive to have a complete game before doing this.
That is extra true if it is related to the memory leak, and a save routine like this is a very obvious place a reference to an object can persist too long and cause what is essentially a memory leak. Running the base game with the only changes being to settings to disable the flash on kill and allow 240fps (which it works fine at), and pausing and tabbing out rather than closing it, I can get through most of a campaign before it must be restarted. That is not bad at all, but if there is a 15 minute autosave and that contributes, it may come much sooner.
Compression is likely to be part of that as well. It can be done in two different ways, either generating text and asking that it be compressed, or internally maintaining a compression table and using binary tokens (I tend to use a standard here, so you can get json with gzip decompression or similar, but custom formats are also common). While the latter is much more efficient, it is also the kind of thing that programmers tend to like to do last if the specs are not very clear going in.
My guess is this is part of the full release, but we see better save handling after saved games start having an expectation of being compatible through releases.