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Author Topic: Async saving  (Read 7590 times)

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metamorphium

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Async saving
« on: December 27, 2009, 01:17:54 PM »

Hi there,

is it hard to create an asynchronous version of Save Game (background saving)? It's kind of big request of portals (save on every step in a way new Monkey Island or Sam and Max do).

Thanks!
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Mnemonic

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Re: Async saving
« Reply #1 on: December 29, 2009, 09:39:22 AM »

Since WME is saving the entire state, it's not quite possible to do this asynchronously, because you'd be saving something that's already changing.
I don't know about Monkey Island, but AFAIK Sam&Max auto-saves at some specific points. Nothing prevents you from doing that in WME, as far as I can tell.
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metamorphium

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Re: Async saving
« Reply #2 on: January 05, 2010, 11:19:36 AM »

Saving games in WME tends to be quite slow. Doing this frequently would kill the players. I was looking for the way how to mask it. Async save could have been used eg. when some FMV plays etc. Simply hiding the fact that there's background saving taking place.

I also had maybe a different idea about the async save than you. I would make a state snapshot independently on what happens next (memory copy?) so of course everything what player does after the save point would have been lost, but it doesn't matter that much. While staring at a saving screen makes the time fly really slow, in reality the same ammount of time would hardly represent a severe gameplay problem. As the save game files are not that large, I don't think it would have been a memory issue either.
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Mnemonic

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Re: Async saving
« Reply #3 on: January 05, 2010, 11:47:57 AM »

Saving games in WME tends to be quite slow.
It tends to be slow if there's a lot of data to be saved.

I would make a state snapshot independently on what happens next (memory copy?) so of course everything what player does after the save point would have been lost, but it doesn't matter that much.
Yeah, but the saved game IS the snapshot. And you can't make a snapshot and let the player change parts of it at the same time...
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Re: Async saving
« Reply #4 on: January 05, 2010, 11:49:08 AM »

btw you mentioned Sam and Max, and this particular game hides the auto-save into scene loading times.
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