Dungeon Master Forum

Would it be possible to add a "Load" game button to the Save/Quit screen?

It would greatly help those of us who have the forsight to save our games before doing something stupid, but then go on to haplessly blunder into whatever Death is lurking just around the next corner. At which point the only option is to completely quit & restart the RTC engine.

Or is RTC not able to reset/overwrite the current game information?

R³

This has been discussed many times before. It seems to be technically difficult to load a different savegame than the last one used without quitting the game. Yet I too would like to be able to manually reload the last savegame similar to reloading upon death, so I don't have to deliberately nuke my characters just to reload the game, especially since it is not always possible to quickly nuke the party.

I think rita is asking for your 'suicide' button rather than loading different games

then it should be an additional 'suicide' button in the disk/save/quit menu instead of another icon in the inventory...

As Beowuuf alludes to there are two separate issues here,

1) Loading a different save game. The way RTC is written, to optimise frame rates and memory usage, is that when loading up a save game it throws away any information that won't be needed. If you then load up a different save game it's possible that some of the information it needs won't be there and won't work.

It's therefore a judgement call as to whether the cost of not throwing the information away is worth the opportunity to load a different save game. My call is that it isn't - over to you to make a convincing argument as to why I should change it.

2) Reloading the same save game. This is technically easy to do; however, I am against it because I think it's an "easy" option symptomatic of the dumbing down of games and encourages people to give up fights / poor positions too quickly rather than trying to overcome the odds.

The original games on the ST / Amiga had it right IMHO (although that was through technical limitations of the hardware rather than design). Because it took ~5 minutes to reload a game people used VI altars etc and tried to make the best of a bad situation.

Again, over to you to convince me otherwise.

This is true, I remember playing most of level three without a champion because of this (decided to power on, decided not to go back up and use the altar on level one) rather than go back to a previous save

Yes. I read the "How to Post a Suggestion" -post and realized then that my actual reason came down to a meagre, "it would save us all a bit of time" argument...which doesn't exactly measure up to that 'cost.'

But I was also curious if there were a technical reason for the lack of such an obvious feature.

RTC's two-step startup process provided a big clue: first preparing the environment, and then restoring the save. It occurred to me that provisions might not have been put into place to return the game's conditions back to Step One. And so I posted this anyway.

However, I hadn't realize that lacking this button had been a part of your grand scheme to encourage more intelligent dungeoneering. And who am I to impede such a lofty goal!

R³

George Gilbert wrote:The way RTC is written, to optimise frame rates and memory usage, is that when loading up a save game it throws away any information that won't be needed. If you then load up a different save game it's possible that some of the information it needs won't be there and won't work.

It's therefore a judgement call as to whether the cost of not throwing the information away is worth the opportunity to load a different save game. My call is that it isn't - over to you to make a convincing argument as to why I should change it.

I am assuming that when you select a dungeon, RTC loads only what is needed, rather than loading everything and then throwing away most of it. This means that most of the memory savings have been gained at the moment of arriving at the dungeon door-- if anything significant were to be gained by what was thrown out when reloading a saved game, then starting a dungeon anew from the front door would be a hulking monstrosity of inefficency, as the whole dungeon has to be in memory at that point.

The dungeon plays fine from the front, so I contend that the savings gained by throwing out extraenous data from a saved game are minor enough that they can be completely ruled out, and by keeping the full dungeon in memory, any saved game can be reloaded.

Should that "keeping the full dungeon in memory" ever be introduced it should have a switch in the config file.

You may prepare several ven boms wanting the restart from the same saving data.

Sophia wrote:...if anything significant were to be gained by what was thrown out when reloading a saved game, then starting a dungeon anew from the front door would be a hulking monstrosity of inefficency, as the whole dungeon has to be in memory at that point.

The dungeon plays fine from the front, so I contend that the savings gained by throwing out extraenous data from a saved game are minor enough that they can be completely ruled out, and by keeping the full dungeon in memory, any saved game can be reloaded.

What do you mean by "dungeon" though? Bitmap data? Sounds? Music? The dungeon itself?

GG already told us years ago that bitmaps are only loaded and scaled the first time they are seen and that audio is only loaded the first time it's used. So memory fills up with all that as the game progresses.

Lunever wrote:Should that "keeping the full dungeon in memory" ever be introduced it should have a switch in the config file.

Why? My entire point was that it was such a small additional amount of memory, it didn't matter. If you can play a dungeon from the front door, I'd think this would be fine for you...

Gambit37 wrote:What do you mean by "dungeon" though? Bitmap data? Sounds? Music? The dungeon itself?

GG already told us years ago that bitmaps are only loaded and scaled the first time they are seen and that audio is only loaded the first time it's used. So memory fills up with all that as the game progresses.

I meant the dungeon itself: where things are, what objects are flying around, and so on. The dynamic loading of graphics and sounds would be completely unaffected by this-- if you reload a save file with some graphics you haven't yet seen in this session of play, they can be dynamically loaded, just the same as always. I assume RTC has some kind of garbage collection to purge graphics/sounds that aren't needed anymore, so the memory usage will be kept under control.

Well, I'm one of those people who run RTC occassionally on a very old machine, so while todays machines wouldn't make the additional memory use noticeable , mine probably would. Hence the switch.

Could not a *compare, purge, and load* sort of function happen here? Where it looks at the list of things it needs to load, what is already loaded and loads what is still needed and purges what is not. I think it's not much different from going up and down stairs really.. if it was meant to return to your last save.

I think really the main deal is the amount of time to exit the whole program, open it again, get to the load screen load the save game and play.. then die and have to do it all over again seems like a waste of time. Not to mention adding to the frustration felt from having died..

So adding it upon death (reload last save point?) would be invaluable... and hardly a matter of someone giving up.. quite the contrary.

Playing on the Amiga this was a constant happening, I would die and need to reload my last save. So rather than reboot the computer and go through the whole loading process again.. I simply loaded my last save.

I think simply adding to the bottom of the screen a "Quit" and a "Load Last save" option would be usefull/time saving.

cowsmanaut wrote:So adding it upon death (reload last save point?) would be invaluable... and hardly a matter of someone giving up.. quite the contrary.

Playing on the Amiga this was a constant happening, I would die and need to reload my last save. So rather than reboot the computer and go through the whole loading process again.. I simply loaded my last save.

I think simply adding to the bottom of the screen a "Quit" and a "Load Last save" option would be usefull/time saving.

It does this already doesn't it?

As you say, it's what the original game did, and so what RTC does. When you die, if you've saved the game beforehand (at any point), or the game was started from a save game, then it offers to reload it...

yep, but you must die first.. i think cows don't want to waste his time bumping in walls or commiting fireball suicide..

Yes, exactly. A simple button that does the same as the reload option from the death screen would be fine.

Then designers will get lazy and include lots of 'yes, that's right, that's a dead end you can't escape from duh why did you do that restart then' areas and players will restart when they simply stub their toe and anarchy and madness will rain and hails of chickens shall fall from the sky and the lion shall lay down with the lamb and a rogue toad will eat then while fire consumes the land!

Or something

Come on Gambit, where's the Christmas thread already *twitch*...festival madness threatening to escape

oh, no I meant as it works then.. I have not played a recent version of RTC it seems.. I seem to remember having to exit everything. if I wanted to kill myself a mon fireball or two facing a wall should do it.

The only way I can see it falling shy of that is if you have weak men who fell down a pit with no escape.. they are wounded but not dead and have no way of killing themselves quickly.. as far as a designer goes.. that takes a good deal of saddistic tendancies to carry out.. not only that but put the best treasures down there like a lof of mon healing potions and top class armour.. wand of endless mon fireballs.. I'm sure that will be the only one they use.

I can see the next ZYX trap... you fall down a pit that it convinced you to try to jump down and then at the end of a long hallway is a sign on a wall and a couple of ful bombs under it. "Only one way out"


moo

cowsmanaut wrote:I can see the next ZYX trap... you fall down a pit that it convinced you to try to jump down and then at the end of a long hallway is a sign on a wall and a couple of ful bombs under it. "Only one way out"

No, Zyx is a good dungeon designer, and that's crap.

Stuff like that ruins dungeons.

Yeah, zyx would have a low level character, and the door would say 'way out' and behind it would be a dragon

Well, as it goes, we are NOT in Amiga/ST age anymore. If one of my characters dies far from an altar and I want to restart, I can do so, but it just takes an awful long moment, but certainly not long enough to keep me from doing it. And it makes me protect my party in any given situation only either from fire or from lightning, even when both might be useful, and it makes me never use up my mana completely, in order to retain suicide ability (at least for experienced wizards).
People who love to go on with crippled parties do have the freedom to so already. To say, "But that's my way of playing dungeon master and because of that all other players in this world shall be forced to play it the same way as I do" isn't very reasonable imho.

True, but only one side of the argument can code the solution for the other side : )

I guess it's also up to the designers of dungeons (just like the security feature of not seeign saved games) as much the players.

Do designers want players to have that freedom, or do they hate players as I do and are happier that if they have spread altars then it is seen as a challenge?

ok then, can't some SUICIDE action be made with RTC mechanics, creating 999 HEALTH_DAMAGER tile ?

First of all, please make a standard item with the bonus of health-999.
Next, the clone of attack method is made, and action is made BOOST_PARTY_BYOBJECT. The item made on is chosen to be object1.
The item that can use the attack method at the end is made, and it puts it on the dungeon.

Party will die immediately if the player uses the item.
However, because I agree to the idea of George Gilbert, this idea is not
personally recommended.

I really don't see what the fuss is all about. There are plenty of ways to kill your party quickly if that's the way you choose to play.

Again: Yes, often you can simply commit suicide, but then there are plenty of situations when you can't - no experienced wizard or no mana left and no suitable door or pit+teleporter around, etc..

Actually Sucide bitton is a greaat idea i would prefere to go starting screen instead, but that's ok too.

Why do i wonna sucide button of some sort? Im playing with the dungeons, testing ideas, looking for bugs. This require a lot of attempts.

Hey, mayby just adding a switch in config file (undocumented enywhere else but this forum), that would anable committing sucide via pressing key combination, like alt+shift+q.

You know that when testing bits of your dungeon, you can just change the party starting location to be by the bit you want to test? Or you can add a teleporter just inside the dungeon entrance which ports the party to the location. Either/or.

This old chestnut. If you're desparate to kill your party, just Alt+F4 the whole game and reload.