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

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Author Topic: No autosave? Seriously?  (Read 6553 times)

Drazan

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #30 on: October 06, 2022, 02:13:11 AM »

I'm wholehertly rejecting cptZooms attitude to this.

Anyway autosave is a must have. It literally has no downsides, but makes the game nearly unplayable for newbies. As many have pointed out it is 2022, games have came a long way. I started playing Starsextor in 2017 and not having autosave was surprising even then. Actually that was the first mod I installed.
So please dont argue aganist something that would only make the game approachable for new pleayers but have no drawbacks for old players.
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cytokine

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #31 on: October 06, 2022, 02:55:39 AM »

Hey now... some of us just like to complain because we're "invested AF".. and prone to yapping about our latest obsession to anyone within earshot. And it's disheartening to imagine the game making a bad first impression on others.

In the last few threads on Reddit by new players asking for mods, the Autosave mod keeps being pretty much the top mention, ahead of pretty much everything else: Speedup, Detailed Combat Results, Stellar Networks, Graphicslib, console commands, QoLP, Nexerelin, SWP...
And at the same time, people keep recommending against content mods for beginners. This hints at two things: (1) The posters know how to handle and enjoy vanilla gameplay, so their opinions should count for something. And (2) that Alex is on the right track when it comes to the vanilla gameplay experience generally, since vanilla is considered sufficient (and enough!) for a first go.

But the 'must-have' utility mods should still inform what should be vanilla features, IMHO. And autosave currently takes the first place.
« Last Edit: October 06, 2022, 03:03:59 AM by cytokine »
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smithney

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #32 on: October 06, 2022, 05:29:23 AM »

Iron mode or not, autosave not being implemented yet basically comes to developer priorities. It makes sense that Alex would want to focus on content because potentially that's the most polarizing component. Important QoL improvements are hardly going to be viewed negatively by most players. If their absence isn't gamebreaking and would need a significant diversion of resources, why develop it first when you need to have the content tested? Especially if there's no hard deadline.

I might obviously be wrong, Alex's head ain't my home address. Just giving a possible explanation that makes sense to me.
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FooF

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #33 on: October 06, 2022, 05:55:01 AM »

I use F5 frequently so an auto save feature would be nice but not mandatory for me. For me personally, I’d like the game to prompt me about every 10 minutes spent in the campaign layer via a prompt. “It’s been 10 minutes since you last saved, would you like to now?” That’s about all I’d want.

If the saving could be done in the background and not interrupt gameplay, sure, more frequently would be fine but as it is, I don’t want interruptions that become obtrusive.
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BCS

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #34 on: October 06, 2022, 08:02:18 AM »


It's ludicrous that the game lacks this basic functionality, and the people arguing against it are little more then contrarians who don't what the game to change.

No one is arguing against the game having autosave, I'm just pointing out how ludicrous it is to turn it into some kind of huge deal. It's like some people literally consider the game unplayable because it doesn't save FOR them.

Quote from: Drazan
Anyway autosave is a must have. It literally has no downsides, but makes the game nearly unplayable for newbies.

Won't someone please think of the newbies! Oh wait, the newbies learn how to quicksave in the tutorial, it's literally the third thing the game teaches them after moving and salvaging. In addition there are several further prompts to quicksave throuought the tutorial which gets new players used to saving often. Won a fight? Save. Accepted a quest? Save. About to fight? Save. I think the poor, hapless newbies will be fine.
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SafariJohn

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #35 on: October 06, 2022, 08:21:55 AM »

I play numerous games where quicksaving all the time is the norm and I have still ragequit Starsector a number of times because I forgot to save for a long while. Autosave is one of several low-hanging fruit Starsector should pick up to improve QoL.
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TJJ

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #36 on: October 09, 2022, 01:49:21 AM »

This has been gone over before many times, and I still don't think there's a magic bullet that gets you performant autosaves.

The best I can think of that'd be practicable, would be for every large but seldomly touched mutable object containing persistent state, to record the frame time at which it was last updated.
When auto-saving you record the frame time, then serialize these large objects in the state graph *live* while the game is running. Once this is complete, you'd check the current frame time to see if any of these objects changed since the auto-save began, and if so, repeat until they didn't.
Only now do you do the 'stop the world' portion of the save, and serialize the small, frequently touched portions of the state graph.

Anyone familiar with Java's Garbage Collector will recognize this solution, as it's kinda how the GC's generational memory compaction model works.

It would be a significant amount of work to retrofit to the game's existing state graph & save process, but not impossibly so.

Beyond that, optimization of the serialization process in general (i.e. not using an xml serializer) could improve saving performance across the board.

Honestly though, I'd rather see the effort spent on developing the game, not addressing a relatively minor QoL feature.
« Last Edit: October 09, 2022, 02:57:09 AM by TJJ »
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Kobura

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #37 on: November 06, 2022, 06:24:04 PM »

Apologies for an old post, but do you really want "yet another thread" ?

One of my friends has a saying, "A pen and paper should never be 'secret tech' in a game"
that is, anything that's really genuinely simple to do in the real world (think Myst: writing down icons and puzzle features" shouldn't be intentionally withheld from the player. Even something as basic as Elder Scrolls 2 had semi-automated Journal functions available to the player. Doing this on purpose is inane and frustrating - there's an art to an implementation like Subnautica not containing a built-in map, where it's a deliberate design choice as opposed to occasionally infuriating negligence.

Arguing against player choice is absolutely without merit. Arguing against a performance issue? Sure. Make a case. But I've noticed a trend - hardliners against things without any discussion or exception tend to be pretty awful in general, and I wish their voices were just a little quieter. Bring me to your side, don't just close the gates... else you might find you're on the wrong side of them permanently.
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FastestDraw

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #38 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'.
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Schwartz

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #39 on: November 07, 2022, 03:30:24 AM »

Off-Main-Thread autosave when docking at colonies for example would be welcome, as you're usually 'safe' then. Even for quick and dirty smuggling runs where you're about to be run down by a patrol, docking at a colony means at least you 'made it' this far. It could also happen when leaving a system for hyperspace (opposed to when you enter a system, you can really screw yourself entering systems, much rarer to happen coming out of them).

Anyway Starsector is the definition of an indie game. Slow development, very small staff, super attentive dev. We're all a little spoiled there I think. I wouldn't hold it against the game not having an autosave at all. Manual quicksave/quickload is something a player *will* end up doing/learning to do anyway.

Nice to have, not essential. There's other things I would rather see implemented before this, given the time it would take to implement this in a way that happens in the background.
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Drazan

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #40 on: November 07, 2022, 01:34:53 PM »

I agree with that as of now there are more important things that needs devtime and they shall focus on that.
However this really is not a "nice to have, not essential" feature in the 1.0 release! This is essential for smoother gameplay and less frustration.
Again, autosave mod is perhaps the most popular mod and even peaople playing "vanila" are using it. There is no reason not to. There were times when i stopped playing starsectorbeacuse I lost hours, and if it was not a in-dev game I probably would not have forgived it.
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Igncom1

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #41 on: November 08, 2022, 10:45:31 AM »

An in development game for how many years now?
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NikoTheGuyDude

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #42 on: November 11, 2022, 05:20:58 AM »

The only thing that makes me not want to save constantly is the time it takes to save. An autosave wouldn't lower the time to save. It'd just make the game freeze whenever it feels like it.

I really don't think one is needed. Just hit F5 whenever you want to save.
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Ryan390

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #43 on: November 11, 2022, 07:10:33 AM »

The OP seems like the kind of person who walks into a resteraunt wearing a leather waistcoat and a monacle, only to complain that the end of his fork is greasy. (immediately condemning the whole establishment)

Dude just press f5 like everyone else, it's not a difficult task.

You appear to come from the hyper modern millennial era of gaming where every 'checkpoint' you reach in your call of duty game is automatically saved.

Games didn't even have auto save back in the day, if you think it's hard hitting f5, try writing down a 30 character password, back in the Amiga days once you reached a new level.

Try looking up pages in manuals and copy protection wheels before your even allowed to start the game (fun) back from the late eighty's.

It's not an essential feature, you are butt hurt because you forgot to press a single key, like I said not a hard habit to get into.

F5 is a universal quicksave feature on so many games.
« Last Edit: November 11, 2022, 07:12:06 AM by Ryan390 »
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Alex

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Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« Reply #44 on: November 11, 2022, 08:23:36 AM »

@Ryan360: this kind of personal attack is totally uncalled for, please review the forum rules and consider this a warning. Everyone, let's keep it civil.


The only thing that makes me not want to save constantly is the time it takes to save. An autosave wouldn't lower the time to save. It'd just make the game freeze whenever it feels like it.

(Yeah - if it wasn't for the time it takes to save, I wouldn't mind adding the feature. But cutting the time down by the amount required is extremely non-trivial.)
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