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novice · July 9th, 2013, 18:00

Feature request to the people fiddling with hosting our pitboss games: Take an autosave every time a player logs out. This should minimize the pain of reloading a game.

Is this a technical impossibility?

spacetyrantxenu · July 10th, 2013, 09:26

I'll look into it tonight.

spacetyrantxenu · July 11th, 2013, 21:24

OK, so this is probably something someone who digs into the SDK should have done. I did a lot of googling around and didn't come up with anything useful. Autosaves are created every time a player logs in and the game host can control how many autosaves are retained via the civ4.ini file. And that's about it, it seems. Obviously since a save file is being created anyway it wouldn't be hard to write a script to scrape it out of the autosave directory and move it somewhere else on the host drive to keep an unlimited number of saves (barring running out of disk space), but that doesn't really solve the problem you're trying to tackle, which is preventing players from having to replay turns after a reload.

The only way I know of to do that is when someone plays a turn and wants to guarantee they don't have to replay it, they have to log back in to the game after they've previously logged out to generate a new autosave with their turn already played. Early game that's no big deal, but in the mid to late game it can take a while to download the save. Sunrise can probably comment on how big the PB8 saves are now, for example, but they're getting bigger and it's taking longer to log back in, so banking a played turn isn't just a 30 second quick log in and log out.

So I didn't help your research any, I'm afraid. But in the process I did learn how to host multiple pitboss instances on one machine, so that's nice. Knowledge++

(By the way, if anyone knows a newer way to do that I'm all ears, that method has one annoying side effect when you launch the server instance, moving all your game saves, etc. into one of the pitboss instance altroots...but nothing that can't quickly be undone).

Commodore · July 11th, 2013, 22:10

Can't we also just save after ending turn?

spacetyrantxenu · July 11th, 2013, 23:12

And then send the file to the host? Sure, but if you're counting on end users to do a manual backup they will never do it. But yeah, that's a good quick solution actually, as long as the game host can get the save from the players when needed.

**SevenSpirits** · July 11th, 2013, 23:24

That turn went great! I'll just take a minute to back it up and then go on with my day.

Stupid RNG!!! Fuck this game, I'm quitting immediately and going to do something else for a while. Oh, backup? No, I didnt make one this time. I guess we have to reload to earlier.

spacetyrantxenu · July 11th, 2013, 23:29

Obviously we don't want that save anyway, we only want the happiest saves in our pitboss servers. No bad karma.

NobleHelium · July 11th, 2013, 23:37

Well if you figure out how to write a program to make a dummy login that triggers a save, that would do it.

Cornflakes

How far do you have to go through the login process to create a save? Would it be sufficient to enter the civ password and the exit back to the main menu when the green download bar pops up?

Lord Parkin · July 18th, 2013, 20:19

(July 18th, 2013, 16:21)Cornflakes Wrote: How far do you have to go through the login process to create a save? Would it be sufficient to enter the civ password and the exit back to the main menu when the green download bar pops up?

IIRC that has a very high chance of corrupting the autosave. Best to wait for the game to load.

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