More comprenehsive autosaving

[Puciek]

Simple idea to allow us to configure autosaving, or just autosave more in general. Couple hooks that should trigger an auto_save, and name the save accordingly:

before_interception - Before entering air combat

after_interception - After air combat

before_mission_start - Before combat starts, when you load it, you are exactly as you were just before, including any squad changes

after_mission - When combat finishes.

mission_turn_X - At the start of every turn of mission

 

This would help greatly with testing, as not only you always have a save to submit from before/after, but also if the game crashes, you didn't really lose progress. 

 

[Chris]

This post is timely because we're shortly planning to do another pass on the autosaves soon - in the next build we're enabling autosaves occurring at the end of every turn in the combat so it's nice and easy to get save games for the bug reports.

I've been trying to figure out what the best approach is with the autosaves (because you don't want to have so many autosaves cluttering the load game list that you can't find your manual saves), and I'm thinking we might just create a folder for each campaign and then a sub-folder within each campaign for each of the battles. That way the game can autosave every turn in the ground combat and also save at every relevant point on the strategy layer and we don't have to worry about the autosaves cluttering up the load game list, or about which autosaves would overwrite each other (e.g. you probably don't want the GC autosaves overwriting the strategy ones).

Pressing Continue on the main menu screen would still load up the most recent save, and manually loading an autosave just involves clicking through one or two folders.

[Puciek]

I like the way new total war handled it - You have one main "directory" per playthrough, and then all saves dumped in there - with a checkbox which can be enable to show autosaves, hidden by default. This way you normally do not get clutter but also doesn't complicate it any more than it must be. To expand, I am just not big fan of folders, always found that I end up doing a lot more clicks overall than I would with just even a messy structure. And that option to hide/unhide autosaves seems to do the trick.

Edited July 26, 2019 by Puciek

[Coffee Potato]

Might be nice to have to have some backup points for when doing IM runs too. Hopefully we can avoid the exploding IM save thingy. 

[Puciek]

That's what I never understood about the IM cheating - you are only cheating yourself. Want to save, do, don't want to - don't. I am kinda against having an iron man as a mode in games in general because it puts unnecessary pressure to play with it on, even if someone may not like it. And if you want that challenge, you can do it just fine with self-discipline.

[ooey]

I have always played xen 1 on iron man. It's a good feeling to pull yourself up from rock-bottom. Also takes away the self-dicipline needed if you don't get it right! It's all part of the game (and life) really.

Edited July 29, 2019 by ooey

[Coffee Potato]

For reference, I was talking about the thing where your IM save would corrupt itself under some rare circumstances. Generally I like playing on IM, and in most cases everything is saved well. X1 had several bugs, including one which killed my first ever campaign, where it crashed mid alien turn, but saved, giving them two turns in a row and pretty much wiping out the best of the bunch with no chance to fight back.