DoomRL > Requests For Features

Can autosave be added in future versions?

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Kornel Kisielewicz:
We cannot discern a forced user shutdown from a power loss. Right now to safely savescum you need to save on each stairs, copy the file, reload, etc. It's tedious, as it should be. If we made an autosave at each level start, that would make savescumming trivially easy, and also ON DEMAND (in contrast to needing to prepare).

Most people that savescum, do so, because they've yet to discover the huge potential for thrill and excitement that permadeath offers. By providing them with a trivial way to do so, we forfeit the chance of them actually playing the game as intended.

There is a solution - we could autosave on each move - however, DoomRL's internal design choices make it VERY hard to implement saving on the spot ( I could give you a long technical explanation but it's late and I'm tired, just trust me that the amount of time to implement that would be much better spent elsewhere ). That still would allow on-demand savescumming, but not after getting into a deadly situation. I quite possibly might implement that for Jupiter Hell though.

BTW, the mortem.txt may be just a text file, but there's a small checksum embedded in the score value, so I can actually spot blatant edits :P.

BaronVonMurderkill:

--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on August 03, 2016, 18:21 ---We cannot discern a forced user shutdown from a power loss. Right now to safely savescum you need to save on each stairs, copy the file, reload, etc. It's tedious, as it should be. If we made an autosave at each level start, that would make savescumming trivially easy, and also ON DEMAND (in contrast to needing to prepare).
--- End quote ---

I think that in most cases it's enough to savescum only once per several levels.


--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on August 03, 2016, 18:21 ---Most people that savescum, do so, because they've yet to discover the huge potential for thrill and excitement that permadeath offers. By providing them with a trivial way to do so, we forfeit the chance of them actually playing the game as intended.
--- End quote ---

Well, it makes sense. But I suspect that understanding of FUN is more of internal thing, and that people who can enjoy roguelikes and similar games will find it anyway.


--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on August 03, 2016, 18:21 ---There is a solution - we could autosave on each move - however, DoomRL's internal design choices make it VERY hard to implement saving on the spot ( I could give you a long technical explanation but it's late and I'm tired, just trust me that the amount of time to implement that would be much better spent elsewhere ). That still would allow on-demand savescumming, but not after getting into a deadly situation. I quite possibly might implement that for Jupiter Hell though.

BTW, the mortem.txt may be just a text file, but there's a small checksum embedded in the score value, so I can actually spot blatant edits :P.

--- End quote ---

What about making mortems generated when game is restored from autosave with line about it?

Evilpotatoe:
While it seems true that making save-scumming "more trivial" might result in a few more people using it, I doubt this is a good-enough reason not to implement auto-save.
I somehow understand this point of view, but it just looks terribly wrong to me, for several reasons, including those ones :

* I doubt that there are many such people here
* Whatever you do, 'tards will always remain.  Resistance is futile :)
* Anyway, if someone has fun using cheats or save-scumming, it's not our problem, but his... or just not a problem at all.  Years ago, when I was still playing Quake I, I once bound some keys to funny actions, like giving quad damage, or full weapons & ammo.
Sure, it "made the game much easier", but trust me, it can be extremely fun anyway !
Also, having "unlimited" ammo, quad, or hp/armors let me try different playstyles, restrictions/challenges, and so on.
* And last, but not least, my personal experience is that this approach causes usually much more problems to legit users than it does to cheaters.  Imo, focusing on creating a good product is a zillion times more important than trying to make it "cheat-proof".  Reminds me of the game "Soldat", which I could never play online due to the buggy and overconsuming "anti-cheat mechanism", or all kinds of DRM...
I think the best saving/loading mechanism I found so far is the one in "Soldier of fortune".  It was something like "In newbie difficulty, you can save/load without limits during a level", but the higher the skill level, the lesser you could use saves.
The consequence was not only that you had to effectively get better when increasing difficulty, but it also somehow enforced the player to realize that without this save restriction, the levels just became too easy.

Since roguelike usually need to manually back-up / restore files for save-scumming, I really see no good reason not to add this damn autosave.
Cheaters perfectly know what they are doing anyway.

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