Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: [1] 2 3 4

Author Topic: No autosave? Seriously?  (Read 6548 times)

ofca

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
No autosave? Seriously?
« on: March 14, 2022, 04:52:40 PM »

Dear coder dudes... It's 2022. I've just lost 5 hours of progress because game decided to randomly crash on me. If it's too hard to add such extremely uncommon feature, then at least include a giant red warning label when starting the game informing the soon-to-be-*** player like me, that they may want to do something to prevent such unfortunate turn of events...

PS. Yes, I've NOW noticed there are mods that include this feature. Don't get me started on some analogy, like glasses with optional 3rd party bottom keeping the fluid in -- glue included.

There, I'm done venting. Now back to the game. Guess now I'll be hitting F5 every 5 minutes.
Logged

Thaago

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 7174
  • Harpoon Affectionado
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #1 on: March 14, 2022, 05:09:36 PM »

The main issue with autosave, and why I wouldn't like it, is that saving takes a while. I don't really want the game to be interrupted at intervals.

The save time is something that could probably be addressed, but would probably require a new saving format/method (so dev time) and the save file would probably not be human readable anymore.
Logged

ofca

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2022, 05:17:51 PM »

Hey, I hear you. But you know what else takes a lot of time? Replaying 5 hours of gameplay ;)
If not at regular intervals, then autosave on dock/undock would improve things to acceptable (and, more importantly, expected) levels.
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #3 on: March 14, 2022, 05:22:16 PM »

I do not want autosave forced.
Logged

ofca

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #4 on: March 14, 2022, 05:26:41 PM »

I wouldn't want it forced either. Before coming here I fully expected I'll rant about autosave being default off in options, not it not existing at all. ;)
Eh, I restarted the game, looked at my sad pathetic fleet and amount of credits, and called it quits. Anyway, that's my $0.03. Do with it what you will.
Logged

Morrokain

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2143
  • Megalith Dreadnought - Archean Order
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #5 on: March 14, 2022, 05:28:28 PM »

I empathize with the lost progress as I've had similar experiences in other indie games and it is frustrating I agree. When a night of free time is precious, having it feel wasted is awful!

Please try to remember that this is a 1-2 person dev team however. You could easily get lost in the number of feature requests that are possible yet take a substantial amount of work to implement. You have to prioritize in that situation and the feature being in the modding community at all is reason enough to not spend unnecessary time on it imo- especially when that makes the feature completely optional.

(I also manually save regularly even in games with autosave because autosave can sometimes screw you where you are stuck in a scenario you cannot realistically beat.)

*EDIT*
I wouldn't want it forced either. Before coming here I fully expected I'll rant about autosave being default off in options, not it not existing at all. ;)
Eh, I restarted the game, looked at my sad pathetic fleet and amount of credits, and called it quits. Anyway, that's my $0.03. Do with it what you will.

Just throwing this out there in case you change your mind, but you can use console commands to get your progress back for the most part.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2022, 05:31:48 PM by Morrokain »
Logged

Dizzy Pilot

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #6 on: March 14, 2022, 08:07:24 PM »

I've lost chunks of progress over the years of playing this game!  I just eventually got used to saving at certain intervals. BTW, there is a mod that adds autosave to the game IIRC.

Happy Hunting.
Logged

DirectionsToL3Please

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 100
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #7 on: March 14, 2022, 11:06:07 PM »

The main issue with autosave, and why I wouldn't like it, is that saving takes a while. I don't really want the game to be interrupted at intervals.
If Autosave were done just when entering a system from hyperspace, the delay would be less of a pain, probably. It would still allow for a moderate chunk of lost time if you enter a big system with several Domain relics to explore (and fight) and do all that then lose to bounty fleet you didn't know about circling the last planet you get to, but it would prevent the big losses of play time you see.  I'd probably still put a timer on it so when doing multi-system enter/exits while out mapping it wouldn't trigger all the time.

And, of course, if it could be toggled off in settings then the NIMBY types would get to have their cake while the rest of us eat ours.
Logged

Histidine

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4661
    • View Profile
    • GitHub profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #8 on: March 15, 2022, 08:58:19 AM »

Random idea: Make autosaves happen in background (i.e. game continues running).
Logged

Sutopia

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1005
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #9 on: March 15, 2022, 09:12:05 AM »

Random idea: Make autosaves happen in background (i.e. game continues running).

I think it would be a good timing when player travels through a jump point, making a snapshot of current game state then do the slow file IO part in the background afterwards.
Logged


Since all my mods have poor reputation, I deem my efforts unworthy thus no more updates will be made.

Jackundor

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 242
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #10 on: March 15, 2022, 11:39:05 PM »

Imo the perfect solution to not lose Progress while not having the unexpected delays from autosaving already exists. Namely the Autosave mod without autosave turned on.

on the mod page of the Autosave mode there's this paragraph:
Quote
Please note: autosaving is disabled by default because save times can become extremely long with many mods enabled. Instead, the mod simply warns you when you haven't saved in a while. If you want to enable autosaving, edit lw_autosave_settings.json.data in the saves/common/config folder and set "enableAutosaves" to true (this file will only exist after you have launched the game with Autosave enabled at least once).

if you don't turn on Autosave then the mod just makes it so that every 15 minutes (or was it 5, i don't remember) a yellow text message will pop up that says "it has been so-and-so much minutes since the last save and in that time there were so many battles and so many market interactions"
the text message is in the same style as the "you've been hit by an Asteroid" messages, just yellow.

This solution prevents you from easily forgetting to save while still giving you the power to decide when to save.
Logged

SonnaBanana

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 867
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #11 on: March 16, 2022, 05:41:08 AM »

Dear coder dudes... It's 2022. I've just lost 5 hours of progress because game decided to randomly crash on me. If it's too hard to add such extremely uncommon feature, then at least include a giant red warning label when starting the game informing the soon-to-be-*** player like me, that they may want to do something to prevent such unfortunate turn of events...

PS. Yes, I've NOW noticed there are mods that include this feature. Don't get me started on some analogy, like glasses with optional 3rd party bottom keeping the fluid in -- glue included.

There, I'm done venting. Now back to the game. Guess now I'll be hitting F5 every 5 minutes.
*autosaves triggers after playerfleetwipe*
Logged
I'm not going to check but you should feel bad :( - Alex

CptZoom

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 14
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #12 on: October 03, 2022, 07:49:02 PM »

"You think you want autosave, but you really don't."
Logged

cerberusti

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 29
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #13 on: October 04, 2022, 02:38:42 AM »

Random idea: Make autosaves happen in background (i.e. game continues running).

I think it would be a good timing when player travels through a jump point, making a snapshot of current game state then do the slow file IO part in the background afterwards.
A traditional C approach to saving state without interruption involves marking page table entries which control the mappings between virtual and physical addresses as read only, then handling the resulting page fault if something tries to write to it by copying the information to a new physical page, updating the address, and marking it able to write before transparently allowing the write to continue.  The best example of this in practice is fork() on unix systems, but windows has substantial support through several methods as well.

A quick check of related terms says background saving without interruption is likely not easy to do in java, and would probably need to be handled by the application logic (which means it is potentially a lot of work to implement and debug, and may increase required memory).

My favorite suggestion so far is the warning message (maybe if it has been more than an hour since the last save). 
Logged

cytokine

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 59
    • View Profile
Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #14 on: October 04, 2022, 02:50:42 AM »

Quote
I've just lost 5 hours of progress because game decided to randomly crash on me. ... I restarted the game, looked at my sad pathetic fleet and amount of credits, and called it quits.
That's gotta sting, that's just awful. I would ragequit too. Just give the game a second chance later.

I agree with OP on this issue. If you treat your new players as unpaid alpha testers, at least listen to their feedback. Starsector is still in alpha, so a new player is in a position similar to an unpaid alpha tester, and this should make their experiences matter, and their feedback carry some weight, if given sincerely. New players will always have expectations and make assumptions, based on the tropes of your genre, and if those assumptions get violated too often, the game is at fault, not the new players. Starsector has no autosaving whatsoever. What contemporary games do not have autosave?

To get an idea of what games are starsector-adjacent, we can use this site, which gives us:
RimWorld, Stellaris, PlanetSide 2, Mount And Blade, Factorio, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Skyrim
So, which of these games don't have an autosave feature? The original mount and blade I guess (not bannerlord). But the lack of it was hardly a feature. The way bannerlord does it would work well IMO.

Add an autosave timer, then trigger a save around that time, preferably at market exit/battle won/jumping, then put the campaign.autosave.zip in the save folder. Loading a save with an autosave newer than the manual save, gives a prompt with a choice of either option. Autosaving without interruption would be nice, but not necessary. This would seem like a good use of dev-time, IMO.

Please try to remember that this is a 1-2 person dev team however. You could easily get lost in the number of feature requests that are possible yet take a substantial amount of work to implement. You have to prioritize in that situation and the feature being in the modding community at all is reason enough to not spend unnecessary time on it imo- especially when that makes the feature completely optional.
IMHO, assuming players will mod your game from day one would not be a good idea, and afaik not what the devs do now. Especially when it's so unclear which mods would be semi-obligatory.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2022, 12:02:04 AM by cytokine »
Logged
Pages: [1] 2 3 4