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[Magicalsushi]

I've been playing A0666.  I'm on level five hundred and fifty something, with 100% kills.  I'm not a very fast player; it usually takes me 8-10 minutes per level.  My PC just crashed while I was playing and I had to power it off.  I've just turned it back on and DoomRL is not giving me the option to continue the game.

Have I just irrevocably lost a game I'd spent 80+ hours on and was quite close to finishing? :|

[thelaptop]

If it's a crash outside of DoomRL, you are SOL.  It's gone Jim; sorry.

If it's a crash inside of DoomRL, there will be a save state generated.

[Magicalsushi]

Outside of DoomRL.  [insert many swear words here]

This seems a bit ridiculous to me.  Surely I can't be the only person whose PC is less than completely infallible?  Why doesn't the game keep a backup while you're playing?  I understand that it's a rogue-like tradition not to let people save and reload, but it does make the game very exposed to external crashes/power cuts, which is really no joke when you're doing Ao666.  On the other hand, I've seen people here talking about save-scumming, or posting save states, so it's not like the current system actually prevents abuse of saves.

Before the crash wiped it out, presumably there would have been a save file that got written each time I saved and quit.  Where would that have been?  Would I have been able to make a copy of it and put the copy back later to continue the game?  If so, then I'll make sure to do this periodically if I ever try Ao666 again.  I'm not planning to bother though - I can't really justify chucking another hundred hours at the game.

It's all a bit depressing. :(  Thank you TheLaptop for your speedy response though.

[Magicalsushi]

Oh, also...I noticed some files called player.wad.backup and score.wad.backup, with the date of my most recent non-crashed session on them.  Could those still be useful in any way?  If the game at least gives me credit for the tonnes of uniques I found and kills I made, at least it won't be a *complete* waste of 80 hours... :\

[thelaptop]

The two wad files store player statistics, so they are less useful for restoration of an active game.

You may attempt to recover the file using standard file recovery software; however due to how undelete software works, there's no guarantee that things work well.  DoomRL never dumps state to the hard drive because it never tries to mitigate hardware failure of any sort.

I feel for you for AAo666, but, well, sometimes some things are beyond dev control.

PS: Just call me thelaptop.  There's no strange capitalisation involved.

[Magicalsushi]

Hmm, good point, there is a small chance it could still be undeletable.  Do you know (roughly) where the state file would have been stored on a Win7 system?  I hadn't been playing long before the crash, so it might not have been blatted yet.

Apologies for getting your name wrong.  I think I've somehow always seen camel casing there even though there isn't any!

[Magicalsushi]

Right, I've answered my own question by starting a new game and saving after level 1.  It creates a file called 'save' in the folder where DoomRL is installed.  I hope I haven't killed the deleted one by doing that.  Recuva hadn't found a file with that name anyway; a deep scan is my last hope now. :'(

[ZicherCZ]

Just a consideration - would it perhaps be worth to add a feature that creates intermediate saves on level descent (rewritten each level, so only one save exists at any time), which would be deleted upon death? This would help such losses on session/computer crashes without helping savescummers too much.

[thelaptop]

Just a consideration - would it perhaps be worth to add a feature that creates intermediate saves on level descent (rewritten each level, so only one save exists at any time), which would be deleted upon death? This would help such losses on session/computer crashes without helping savescummers too much.

I dunno... it seems to be too much effort for something that happens extremely rarely.

But I don't have the final call; just voicing my opinion.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

So basically the player would task-kill the game as soon as getting into big trouble? That would basically be free save/load...

[ZicherCZ]

So basically the player would task-kill the game as soon as getting into big trouble? That would basically be free save/load...

Those who would abuse task-killing the session are probably cheaters or savescummers even without this feature (though this will make their cheating a bit easier, that's true). But legit players would have a way of preventing crash-losses like the OP.
It's just my opinion. If it's too little gain for too much effort, I can happily live without it.

[Thiebs]

Would it be possible to put a number code in the save file (maybe date and time or something unique like that) that the game keeps track of, so you can't load the same save more than once? It would stop all but the most dedicated cheaters. How feasible would that be?

[thelaptop]

ZicherCZ hit the nail on the head -- it is too much effort to provide software-level guarantees against crashes that are outside of the software's control, and in this case, I am referring to DoomRL.  Side point: any software-level guarantee that can restore a working state from an external crash can be easily abused for savescumming.

Again, we're talking about mitigating a very rare occurrence (1 out of potentially tens of thousands of hours of game play).  It is much better to have a more systematic prevention of computer crashes than to have DoomRL implement failsafe-yet-cheater-unfriendly behaviour.

I have lost things far more important than an extended DoomRL game before after having worked on them for a long time.  I know the pain, but it's something that ought to be resolved at the operating system level and not at the application level.

[Magicalsushi]

As far as I'm concerned, it's only a serious problem on AAo666 runs.  I'd be irritated if an external crash killed an A0100 run on level 99, but it'd only take a few evenings to do another one.  An AAo666 game being destroyed by a crash though is pretty devestating.

How about having the game make an automatic backup after every 101 levels?

[Magicalsushi]

Ugh, it didn't even retain stats for all the enemies I killed, uniques I found and assemblies I created - even after I replaced player.wad and score.wad with one of the backups.  This being the case, what purpose do these backups actually serve?

[Sambojin]

It's in case there's a "horrible" crash. No player or score or anything .wad file.

Strangely enough, there's very little stopping you savescumming in drl, but you just don't do it or claim it unless it's really cool or there to help others. It looks pretty bad to post a scummed game on the forum, but drl is a game with a high skill cap (in it's way).

Meh, we need a save-scum post (in a good way, for the cool shit), and you my friend, need a less crashy computer. For the cool shit.