saving in FTL

General discussion about the game.
slack
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2012 6:24 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby slack » Tue Jun 19, 2012 6:54 pm

SparroHawc wrote:
Enkido wrote:i use vmware to load and save, works like a charm


And this is why not including a save feature is ridiculous. If saves don't exist to eliminate save scumming, you have already failed.


Has it been said that's the only reason it wasn't implemented (Edit: honest question, I haven't looked hard for a planned feature list)? It is after all another feature to write and test. Maybe they want to get a solid product out the door faster to let the people who have been begging for beta keys elsewhere in the forum play.

That said, I would also love save on exit. For now I've just been sucking it up and quitting when I need to (or playing way too late into the night).
remowilliams
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Jun 16, 2012 8:47 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby remowilliams » Tue Jun 19, 2012 7:21 pm

The Dev's original vision of their game, and technical constraints aside for a moment - this being a single player game, there is no reason for not having a save on exit function.

So what if people want to do save scumming? Does it effect their experience of the game? Sure. Does it effect mine? No.

I used to get irked when I saw people playing games like Morrowind or Oblivion running around simply trying to kill everything and paying no attention to the storylines, or any of the deeply satisfying experiences they had to offer. I was like 'Why would you even bother playing that way? It's pointless and stupid.'

But here's the key - they were having fun and enjoying it they way they saw fit. And if that was their way of enjoying it, and it didn't effect me or others - who am I to tell them let alone lobby to force them to do otherwise... ?
hillhome
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:24 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby hillhome » Tue Jun 19, 2012 7:27 pm

Having two small kids at home here's my simple solution:

ALT + TAB

Just let the thing run in the background until you have time to get back to it <shrug> no big deal!
Check out the fun on http://twitch.tv/hillhome!
reverend
Posts: 30
Joined: Sat Jun 16, 2012 5:30 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby reverend » Tue Jun 19, 2012 7:37 pm

hillhome wrote:Having two small kids at home here's my simple solution:

ALT + TAB

Just let the thing run in the background until you have time to get back to it <shrug> no big deal!



Riiight. When your next available slot for playing could be days away? Short term, yes, sure. But I won't be letting my PC run over night and all through the next day at the office just to resume the game.

Also, the kickstarter vs. personal project problem. The postulated 20 minutes per playthrough is the average of the devs themselves who know the game in and out. They should realise that they now have a much, much larger playerbase with a quite diverse approach to playing the game. And, judging by this thread, both slower and more limited in continuous time. ;)
Tarnimus
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Jun 16, 2012 4:26 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby Tarnimus » Tue Jun 19, 2012 8:49 pm

My worry is that a save game feature might be one of those things that really needs to be incorporated from the ground up (a bit like a multi-step undo feature in a creative app), otherwise it's very difficult if not impossible to retrofit at a later date. Hopefully this isn't the case.

To return to the assertion earlier in the topic that the lack of save/resume wouldn't have any actual effect on how much I played the game (the poster appeared to be insinuating that we were unreasonably asking for a feature that none of us *actually* needed): unfortunately I've not been able to play the beta for several days now. I've had time, sure - 10 minutes here, maybe 20, occasionally half an hour. A game of FTL might fit into that time slot (especially given how rubbish I am at it!), but the possibility that it might not tends to dissuade me from even starting it up, as I wouldn't want to get halfway through and then have to abandon it.

And something I probably haven't mentioned in my earlier posts in this topic: I absolutely love this game. It's on track to be one of my top games of the year (if not my #1), so it'd be really tragic if this missing feature resulted in me never quite having the time to even play it. :/
aviphysics
Posts: 54
Joined: Sun May 27, 2012 3:17 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby aviphysics » Tue Jun 19, 2012 8:59 pm

slack wrote:
SparroHawc wrote:
Enkido wrote:i use vmware to load and save, works like a charm


And this is why not including a save feature is ridiculous. If saves don't exist to eliminate save scumming, you have already failed.


Has it been said that's the only reason it wasn't implemented (Edit: honest question, I haven't looked hard for a planned feature list)? It is after all another feature to write and test. Maybe they want to get a solid product out the door faster to let the people who have been begging for beta keys elsewhere in the forum play.

That said, I would also love save on exit. For now I've just been sucking it up and quitting when I need to (or playing way too late into the night).


As best as I can tell, it is the only reason.

They already have some kind of save feature to store which ships you have unlocked along with some statistics.

Writing a formatted string to a file containing the necessary variables should be pretty trivial. In fact yesterday, in about an hour, I implemented a nice automatic incremental save feature in a data processing program I have been working on.

Even encrypting the data first would be trivial. A little googling can turn up a variety of eazy methods to do this. A few people have already figured out how to screw with the game in memory so there isn't any reason to make hacking saved games harder than that.
aviphysics
Posts: 54
Joined: Sun May 27, 2012 3:17 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby aviphysics » Tue Jun 19, 2012 9:12 pm

Tarnimus wrote:My worry is that a save game feature might be one of those things that really needs to be incorporated from the ground up (a bit like a multi-step undo feature in a creative app), otherwise it's very difficult if not impossible to retrofit at a later date. Hopefully this isn't the case.


My coding experience does not indicate any reason why this would be the case. In well written code it should be easy.

The way I write my own code is very modular to make testing small sections simple. This also means I can set up some initial conditions and load up any part of the code without difficulty. Without doing this, trouble shooting code is a total PITA. Just having to run through the a lot of the program and getting the right ship load out to make sure you really fixed a particular problem in one small part would be a pain.
reverend
Posts: 30
Joined: Sat Jun 16, 2012 5:30 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby reverend » Wed Jun 20, 2012 7:22 am

aviphysics wrote:My coding experience does not indicate any reason why this would be the case. In well written code it should be easy.

The way I write my own code is very modular to make testing small sections simple. This also means I can set up some initial conditions and load up any part of the code without difficulty. Without doing this, trouble shooting code is a total PITA. Just having to run through the a lot of the program and getting the right ship load out to make sure you really fixed a particular problem in one small part would be a pain.



Exactly my thoughts on all accounts. Well structured code is easy to serialize, hell, just pump it out through JSON if you can't be bothered to write your own mechanisms. And I can't imagine debugging player issues without having some way to consistently replicate them from a saved game...
shepdozejr
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Jun 20, 2012 8:52 am

Re: saving in FTL

Postby shepdozejr » Wed Jun 20, 2012 9:08 am

Needs a save on exit feature. This should be all there is to this discussion.
modernatomic
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri May 04, 2012 4:18 pm

Re: saving in FTL

Postby modernatomic » Thu Jun 21, 2012 12:47 am

Put me down as another in favor of a simple save on exit/continue. Like many others, I am often limited in how much time I can spend on a game, and if I'm doing well, a game can last over an hour. I find myself in the same position as some others: deciding not to fire up FTL because I don't have the ability to pick it up again later, should I have a successful run but run out of time.