Saving games

[amaprotu]

Will you allow multiple saved games in the 'final' version? Maybe this should be a setting somewhere in the dat files, however my argument would be that it should just always be allowed. The reason is that in the original (at least for the atari) you could save to disks and we had at least 5 or 10 saved game disks around the computer whenever we played. Or maybe you could set the save path somewhere? Defualt could be the dm/save direcectory but then people could set it to a: or just a different directory beofre they started the game. Right now with the original game there are three copies of the entire game on my computer, so I have 3 saves. Kinda silly to do it this way.

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[cowsmanaut]

That's a good idea.. there should be the ability to have multiple saves.. Everyone knows what it's like to have a bad save.. if you can go back to a previous you are ok.. but if not your are screwed.

I would say at least 10 save spots should be supported

[beowuuf]

What an odd blind spot...i've never thought of this either but it should have been one of the first suggestions. Every other game has multiple slots, it's strange that DM never did that, with a .dat file only 40 odd Kb long

[Gambit37]

Part of the original pilosophy behind the development of DM was that it should be "a real-time graphic adventure where nothing should interrupt the gameplay". I think this is why FTL decided to make it so that only one save game could be placed on disk - it avoided having to spend ages managing files, disk handling routines, etc etc.

DM2 has multiple save slots - I think it's 10. It's easier to implement it there because it's all on the HD and saving is almost instant.

BTW, a little known fact: In the ST and Amiga versions of DM, random disk accesses were built into the game. You'd hear the whirring of the drive and see the drive light come on and think "Shit! Something's being loaded into the corridor up ahead!" But that was just to get your adrenaline going, and I can vouch that it worked! I remember Wayne Holder stating this in an early magazine interview.

[George Gilbert]

As far as saved games go, I was more thinking in precisely the opposite direction - namely no save games. Obviously you could save the game and play it later (as you wouldn't normally complete DM in one sitting), but it would be (semi) easy to eliminate multiple loadings from one save game.

In particular it would mean that once your party has died, then they are dead, and you can't go back to a save game and repeat that section - you have to start again. It would (obviously) make the game substantially harder as you would have to explore more carefully rather than just going head-long into battle to see what's up then trying again. It would also eliminate the practice of saving just before you gain a level then re-loading if you don't like the stats increases...

[beowuuf]

God i remember that! It was freaky, especially when settling for a few seconds to consult a map, and here the drive going - jumping back with hands on mouse and keyboardto see if anything was about to happen (playing DM in the semi-dark with sound was always fun).

And i like the phylosophy of the disk saving

Two thoughts if people want to keep saving simple then

a) have a quicksave option like most FPS
b) have simple graphic to click on (10 disk icons?) to save to, and that's that. Adding labels isn't part of the save, and to do this or change the label you right click on the disk icon instead, or click on the label itself.


Just a thought...

[theadder]

Oh god, no way should you stop people saving George.

I've played RPG's in the past where being dead meant you had to start again. I played these games once until the point where I died for the first time, and then they went in the bin.

If somebody is sad enough to want to reload a game just to get a better stats increase when they go up a level, then why shouldn't they.

Lets be honest here - if you build in such a system, you will be giving us a game which is designed to be flexible but in which people can't save as they like.

When I play RPG's, I generally save virtually every time I take a few steps - just in case.

[beowuuf]

I do think that saved games should be to everyone's tastes. Especially in the old games on the amiga, i was always very tempted to restart the section from an old disk if someone died, or i was trapped in a tough situation, but i usually carried on anyway on a with the game on a new disk and never looked back. At least I had the option to carry on, restart, whatever though.

I'm just thinking of the game Project IGI. A different genre (FPS), it allowed no inter-section saves, which seemed to amount to lots of bloody minded playing the same area to death and memorising enemy positions. Lifespan..none! Who wants to play the game again when you've already played through it 1000 times to reach the end once (if you can be bothered getting there).

A good balance, if the sleep ideas posted below sound feasable, is that you can only save during sleep - so no saving half way through a fight, or if you aren't sure what the next turn entails - you need to be in a safe cleared out section, which would probably be in a natural break anyway. And also if certain levels have the 'nightmare' effect, then you must complete these areas in one go, no back ups...

The point being, as soon as you introduce any save restriction, there are ways around it (though fairly longwinded). I can stop the game and quit out, saving it, copy the file in windows, and restart, knowing i can replace the original position if needed.

[amaprotu]

My real point is that the original DM *did* allow multiple saved games, via multiple disks. If the option you decide to go with is only one where you can change the path of saved games so you can save to the a drive and have multiple save disks, I can live with that. I would much rather have either multiple save slots ( 3 or 5 or 10 or whatever) or to just use the standard windows saving routine.

Beowuuf is right, currently I have 3 copies of DM on my computer, 2 are my saved games and one is my brothers. The game is small (about a meg I think) so its not really a problem of space, just annoyance. And since you are making this one, it doesn't seem like it has to be that way. <p> <a href="http://www.icq.com/icqtour/webcomm.html"><img alt border="0"src="http://online.mirabilis.com/scripts/onl ... e.gif"></a> AMAPROTU
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[George Gilbert]

Done ages ago!