Why no Save game Feature

[NTJedi]

Wyehl said:
I only mean that it seems to me that most of the people who are against a save game feature are regular posters in this forum while the people who are for it are a mix of regular posters and newbies like myself

I'm not strongly against the save game feature... I'm more strongly supporting other issues which need attention first. If you've scanned the largest sticky bug thread you'd see there's plenty of work which needs to be done and that's not including the long list of OTHER features people want added which is well over 70-something from the patch improvement thread.
Thus when I see a topic requesting a feature which has a known workaround... it's like complaining to your congressman or government official about banks not being open on Sunday, when there's obviously much larger issues which need attention. Another point is 98% of all the other features which have been suggested don't have workarounds unlike the save game feature request.

[alexti]

Wyehl said:
They also mentioned Civ4, which is an excellent game by most accounts.

Civ4 took rather interesting approach to save games. Reloading the game was so insanely slow that nobody would want to reload unless one absolutely must had to turn the computer off I don't know whether it was an intentional decision or just a result of overall poor coding that plagued otherwise very good game

[NTJedi]

I wish I had the time to use all the modding features available within CIV_4.

[Gandalf Parker]

alexti said:

Civ4 took rather interesting approach to save games. Reloading the game was so insanely slow that nobody would want to reload unless one absolutely must had to turn the computer off I don't know whether it was an intentional decision or just a result of overall poor coding that plagued otherwise very good game

Actually that is one of the options that gets mentioned in programmer forums. A way to give it to them but not really give it to them. As if "well this was the best I was able to do".

Things like:
slow save

slow reload

save only when quitting the game

save only at special places in the game that are far apart

randomly generating as much as possible and including it in the save so reload cant cheat

not allowing naming of saves so that you only get one save at a time (keeps you from long-term backtracking)

Of course the people doing it those ways are given a hard time about giving in to players over the quality of the game. But no one gives them too hard a time for avoiding the flak by giving crappy saves. And before anyone says anything, no I dont think that happened here. What we have is standard Linux saves for a pbem game. Nothing else would have made much sense in Dom1 and only seems reasonable now because of the improved menus in Dom3.

[Saxon]

add a feature for those too lazy to use a known workaround.

I am not lazy, I have a baby! I usually look like this smily and cherish what time I have with the game. Learning some DOS codes to create a batch file is not what I want to do with my few stolen personal moments.

[Wyehl]

NTJedi said:
If you've scanned the largest sticky bug thread you'd see there's plenty of work which needs to be done and that's not including the long list of OTHER features people want added which is well over 70-something from the patch improvement thread.
Thus when I see a topic requesting a feature which has a known workaround... it's like complaining to your congressman or government official about banks not being open on Sunday, when there's obviously much larger issues which need attention. Another point is 98% of all the other features which have been suggested don't have workarounds unlike the save game feature request.

I think those are probably the best 'anti-save' points that have been made (minus the analogy). The only problem with them is that they presume the quality of this requested feature to be poor when, apparently, there are several people that would disagree.

Let's be fair, though. It isn't a question of a save game feature vs. a game killing bug. Since new content and features are released with patches, it's really a question of the save game feature vs. other features that have been requested. I acknowlege that you have said as much, I just want to be clear.

For these two arguments (which are really shades of the same argument), it all comes down to the idea that people disagree on:
A) What priority a save game feature should be.
B) How much effort it is to code it (can't recall if anyone but Gandalf made this argument but it is relevant to (A), in any case, so I am throwing it in).

I don't even know what priority it is in the spectrum of other features and I think it's a fair question, though maybe it wasn't posed all that fairly. Honestly, that's what got me involved, I jumped in because the other anti-save arguments were just begging me and I succumbed.

Just a phrase ? No! They were begging me, I tell you, I could hear them saying "You can't let me go, you know you can't...fine, but my friend here is an even greater exageration, can you resist him ? How about a straw man ? Smugness ? Sarcasm ? Oh come on, Wyehl, you can't resist us all, you know we will get you..."

...and they did. The little bastages got me and here I am.

Thanks for indulging my...umm, imagination.

[Saxon]

Sorry, that was a bit shrill. However, the point stands that different people have different priorities, wishes, dreams and fantasies about what might happen to the game and our reasons for those wishes are just as diverse.

As a point of reference, fear the new parent! Buy them coffee and return after 12 months�

[NTJedi]

I truly hope the score graphs are fixed soon.

The loss of functionality from Dominions_2 is quite noticeable.

First anytime an opponent is killed their entire graph history vanishes... thus making it impossible to review the overall history during middle, late and end of the game.

Second if a computer or human opponent wins the game from a victory condition then all human opponents are deleted from the graph history! Making it again impossible to review how you as a human were doing during the game.

It's actually quite sad the graphs provide LESS than what the Dominions_2 graphs provided.

[RamsHead]

NTJedi said:


I truly hope the score graphs are fixed soon.

The loss of functionality from Dominions_2 is quite noticeable.

First anytime an opponent is killed their entire graph history vanishes... thus making it impossible to review the overall history during middle, late and end of the game.

Second if a computer or human opponent wins the game from a victory condition then all human opponents are deleted from the graph history! Making it again impossible to review how you as a human were doing during the game.

It's actually quite sad the graphs provide LESS than what the Dominions_2 graphs provided.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Looking back at the graphs and seeing the major events at the end of a game is fun. Or was fun.

[Gandalf Parker]

Not to downplay this but there is a crappy alternative.
--scoredump will create an html file of the scoreboard information. Of course if you want historical info then you need to set up the --preexec to rotate the copies. Its something I do for most of the games I host.

But I do wish there was an easy way to get a screenshot of the scoreboards each turn since I like the graph better. However if someone with a background wants to tackle
--scoredump, to import into spreadsheet, to graphing package
then we could have a nice feature there.

Gandalf Parker
--
Its a computer. Nothing is impossible. The word impossible is a
technical term meaning "I could get it to work but it would be more time
and trouble than its worth"