• @[email protected]
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    94 months ago

    Day 347: I’m still trying to exit the game. Send help, I can’t close the game without losing my progress!

  • Queen HawlSera
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    54 months ago

    This is why I have no tolerance for games with limited saving… Which is painful as a Resident Evil fan who prefers the early games

    (No surprise that I use unlimited saving mods)

  • CodexArcanum
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    34 months ago

    The new Prince of Persia is the worst for this! There’s no auto-cloud save, so you have to manually manage uploading and downloading to the one cloud save slot between your three on-device slots.

    And no matter what, no matter how long it’s been, it asks about it, like: “Your last save was 0 minutes ago, as you sure you want to exit?”

    • JackbyDev
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      64 months ago

      Or even just “Has the menu been closed since it was saved?”

      • @[email protected]
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        34 months ago

        That’s harder to implement. Suddenly you need to store that extra state somewhere and don’t mess it up. The last save should already have a timestamp and is immutable. A lot less likely to get bugs that way.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          Do you not need to store that state to pause the game anyway? How else would you end the menu loop?

          • @[email protected]
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            34 months ago

            The state “the game is paused” is different from " the game is paused and saved". Sure that could be another key in some atate machine but like above: it’s the “not mess it up” part that is harder.

            • @[email protected]
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              24 months ago

              I feel like I’ve seen a “Time since last save:” line on enough games to find it hard to believe that “paused and saved” is difficult to check for lol

              These are variables that already exist in most games, it just needs one more line of code to check them

              • @[email protected]
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                34 months ago

                Plus all the lines to update the state, when the menu is closed, when the game is closed (i.e should it be true or false at startup), when the game is saved obviously.

                That’s at least three more lines plus the one you mentioned for no extra value. And again it’s easier to screw it up e.g. while refactoring.

                • @[email protected]
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                  24 months ago

                  I think we write our code in different enough ways that we’re not seeing eye to eye.

                  Tracking the state of the game being paused, when the menu is open and when the game is saved can all be a single match statement on a current “game state” variable which just holds “running/paused/paused and saved/exit” and when it becomes exit, it checks the save time. Only 2 lines of code and adding an enumerated state to the variable to add this functionality. Since the variable is enumerated, it’s really difficult to mess it up when refactoring because if you can’t pass the wrong code or else your game doesn’t save or close

  • @[email protected]
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    604 months ago

    Even worse. Games with a mysterious auto save “feature” that don’t allow a manual backup save. There’s a special place in hell for those developers.

    • @[email protected]
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      94 months ago

      Idk, I feel that’s okay as long as the saves are incredibly frequent and reliable.

      I’ve never lost progress in a From Software game for instance, and they have an only auto save system, but it saves literally everything you do as soon as you do it, so unless you deliberately alt-F4 instantly after doing something, you won’t lose any progress.

      • @[email protected]
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        134 months ago

        Can you reload old saves, or only the most recent? I think being able to reload an older save is important in the case of glitches (NPC walks through wall and is unreachable etc)

        • @[email protected]
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          104 months ago

          Ah, the trauma of every Bethesda RPG player.

          There are game studios out there that don’t release broken garbage that needs the player to walk on eggshells, backup saves, and do arcane console commands to make the game playable.

        • @[email protected]
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          34 months ago

          They solved that by having most of the game revert to starting positions frequently (e.g. every time you die, area load).

          Maybe not as immersive as Bethesda games but their lore at least tries to make sense of it.

          It’s more like playing the Edge of Tomorrow movie, you need to learn where everything is.

        • @[email protected]
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          34 months ago

          Only the most recent.

          I also have never had any issues with game breaking bugs like that. I’ve encountered some glitches but nothing a save+reload couldn’t fix. Everything just resets to its normal spawn point.

    • JackbyDev
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      124 months ago

      There’s also a place in hell for devs who don’t include a “save and quit” in rogue like games because they’re worried people will save scum. As if honest people who can’t devote enough time for a full playthrough are less important than people lying about progress in a non competitive single player game.

      • Ziglin (it/they)
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        34 months ago

        I assume it’s more about the hassle of implementing a way of serializing the game state for storage in most cases but if people want to cheat in a single player game let them or better yet seed the rng so that the outcome is the same anyways.

  • @[email protected]
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    64 months ago

    One time during the final mission in Batman Arkham City I hit the power button at the same frame the auto-save turned on. My save was corrupted and I had to speedrun the story again. Thank god I wasn’t doing Riddler trophies I would’ve gone insane.

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    Flashbacks of playing Metal Gear Solid 2 at a time of frequent unexpected power cuts. Painful.

  • @[email protected]
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    124 months ago

    They could improve this so much by saying something like “the last 2 minutes and 24 seconds of unsaved progress will be lost” instead. Just need to keep a time counter from last save, that’s not too much overhead.

    • William
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      74 months ago

      There are even games that already do this. I still end up second-guessing, but at least “you last saved 8 seconds ago” makes me pretty sure I got it.

  • ADKSilence
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    144 months ago

    It’s clearly bad juju if you dont then save again just to be sure.