Warzone 2100 Forums

Forwarding http://bugs.debian.org/587530

A Debian/warzone2100 user noticed that there is no autosave feature. They think it would be nice if the game is automatically saved every 10 or 30 minutes so that when it does crash one doesn't loose everything. They were using 2.2.4 and experienced a crash.

pabs wrote:Forwarding http://bugs.debian.org/587530

A Debian/warzone2100 user noticed that there is no autosave feature. They think it would be nice if the game is automatically saved every 10 or 30 minutes so that when it does crash one doesn't loose everything. They were using 2.2.4 and experienced a crash.

That feature has been introduced in 2.3.

Hmmm, seems like the autosave happens just at the end of the mission rather than every X minutes like the Debian reporter suggested.

pabs wrote: They think it would be nice if the game is automatically saved every 10 or 30 minutes so that when it does crash one doesn't loose everything.

Excellent idea. Although my WZ2100 build has never crashed even once. Nevertheless, a useful feature even in case of no crashes maybe?

I prefer 5 mins (or even less) of autosave interval, because a lot can happen in 5 mins.

But would regular saves cause the gamer to encounter a noticeable freeze (in seconds or milliseconds) during gameplay?

j0shdrunk0nwar wrote:But would regular saves cause the gamer to encounter a noticeable freeze (in seconds or milliseconds) during gameplay?

Possibly. I got the game stopped for around a half second when I save manually. But mostly I'm on my Eee! Didn't check this on my custom system.

The reporter was on 2.2 which was a bit more crashy than 2.3.

Any slowdown could be minimised by first quickly making a copy of the save in memory and then lazily/slowly writing it out to the disk in the background.

One other nice thing about regular autosaves would be that you could autosave skirmishes, which aren't autosaved at the moment.

pabs wrote:Any slowdown could be minimised by first quickly making a copy of the save in memory and then lazily/slowly writing it out to the disk in the background.

Asynchronous Writes to disk? Where is Zarel when you need him?

Yeah, current autosave mechanism needs more work for sure.
I would like to see an option to set interval in minutes with possibility to disable it at all.
I don't remember if it was fixed already (as far as I remember ticked was closed, but I don't remember reason...) but there was bug that lead to lost of one of savegames if there were no empty slots and entry used for autosave was reused for regular save, then autosave just overwrote one of regular saves.

j0shdrunk0nwar wrote:Asynchronous Writes to disk? Where is Zarel when you need him?

Erm, why do we need me?

I'm not an I/O guy. Go look at someone else. >_<

Zarel wrote:

j0shdrunk0nwar wrote:Asynchronous Writes to disk? Where is Zarel when you need him?

Erm, why do we need me?

I'm not an I/O guy. Go look at someone else. >_<

Alright, don't sweat it! I mentioned you because, well, how do I put this, if Warzone2100 were a soccer match, then you would be the referee

And you're probably the only developer who is most active in this section of the forum.

Anyway, do you think autosave is a bad idea? How about pressing a function key like 'F5' to autosave instead of regular interval saving? Like how many other games do it.

Autosave is a good idea, but like we said, saves freeze the game. Threading the save might work, though.

Zarel wrote:Threading the save might work, though.

Ok, one last question (hopefully). By threading, did you mean this concept?

Yes.

I have the most current version (3.3) and there is still no autosave feature in campaign mode. It doesn't save at the end of a completed mission or even prompt you to manually save after completing a mission. I've lost hours of progress due to forgetting to save and then failing the next mission. Am I missing something?

Hey, talk about necroposting. 10 years!

From what I can see (just searched the code for "autosave", it was implemented in 2.3 beta 8, but got pulled in 3.1 because the savegames were unloadable.

The changelog names another release, 3.3.1, which should implement it.

If you want to, you can try building from the source yourself (or perhaps we have "nightly builds") and see if its working.