Autosave

[Arpia]

out of curiosity, how hard/simple would it be to implement some kind of autosave?
with all kinds of things causing random crashes and closing to desktop I keep losing my saves - having to repeat missions I've *just* completed - losing progress... I know the obvious solution is to save more frequently. but come on... we've all done it, you forget every so often, then BAM! lost progress.

[anonilsus]

Good autosave places would be geoscape and battle.
geoscape everytime something happens like ufo crashed, landed (maybe not detected), research and manufacturing finshed etc.

[Arpia]

well yeah, I mean *anything* would be good at this point, I'm having trouble just making it through a terror mission now. :/
but if we're gonna talk about fleshing out the details then Ideally geoscape as anonilsus mentioned above-that and then battlescape after you've ok'd equipment, then every two (xcom) turns. preferably it would save seperately from player saves and simply overwrite itself with a timestamp

[Daiky]

Probably not too hard to implement, but it need to be optional. One savegame called "autosave" that's overwritten every time and that also saves in the battlescape every turn. It could even help finding crashes I guess, if at least the crash occurs again after loading the savegame and repeating the same actions.

[Arpia]

Yeah I totally agree that it can be a good tool for bug catching, I've spotted lots of things that made me go 'thats not right...' but I dont report it cos the save is too far back to replicate those conditions. And they can be too intermittent to know what just happened to try and replicate it from seeing it just once, it'd be nice if I can replay the scene a bit to try and play around and test what went down.

[anonilsus]

This would also be a good opportunity to implement the "Ironman" game mode where you can't save manually at all.
You just get one autosave which saves at every possible step, basically a "Save State" function like in an emulator, only as real data save to there is no re-loading of earlier states.

If someone dies, he dies. If you misclicked, you misclicked. Oops, missed the day/night horizon by a few pixels and now you have to do a night mission against chryssalids? Well, so be it.

[SupSuper]

The only reason we didn't implement an autosave before is because the "saving lag" was considerable, but maybe now it'll be better.

This would also be a good opportunity to implement the "Ironman" game mode where you can't save manually at all.
You just get one autosave which saves at every possible step, basically a "Save State" function like in an emulator, only as real data save to there is no re-loading of earlier states.

If someone dies, he dies. If you misclicked, you misclicked. Oops, missed the day/night horizon by a few pixels and now you have to do a night mission against chryssalids? Well, so be it.

This however is a pretty risky proposition, as we still have plenty of bugs that can ruin your save unless you can load another game further back.

[anonilsus]

This however is a pretty risky proposition, as we still have plenty of bugs that can ruin your save unless you can load another game further back.

I write (and read) all suggestions in this forum for a stable, >=1.0 version

[Arpia]

The only reason we didn't implement an autosave before is because the "saving lag" was considerable, but maybe now it'll be better.

Sssssoo... is that a yes? >.>