Quicksave/quickload related problem

[Johan-c]

I haven't even been playing KSP all that long, however I have been finding the quicksave / quickload feature to be the bane of my playtime. 

The intention of how KSP deals with saving the game in general, seems to be that the player should for the most part be unaware that saving and loading is happening and they should seamlessly continue where they left off, every time they resume their career game.  So far so good, and it sounds like a really good principle to me.

But then Quicksave enters stage left, and leaves some stuff on the ground that we can trip over.  What I find myself doing, is using quicksave very sparingly, because having to think about quicksaving interrupts the flow of the game.  Then occasionally I find myself up the creek with a tennis racket instead of a paddle (or, more literally - with an overturned Minmus lander and all my Kerbonauts stuck on board).  So what do I do?  I think "aha!  I know, hold down F9 to quick load!".  Except then, when I do that - I realise only after staring at the loaded scene in some amazement, that the last time I quicksaved was several hours (or even several days) of real-world game time ago.  THEN, after poking around the interface with a growing sense of despair, I realise that there is no way to recover from this situation.  If I quickload again - nothing much changes.  If I go to the pause menu and "Load Game" from there, I find that my career save has been updated right after quickloading.  There's no way out.  I abandoned my first career game after losing nearly a week's worth of progress this way, and last night I had to re-fly a long complicated multi-biome science mission (to Minmus.  This is where the lander overturned).

 

So.  As a player, this encourages me to either use quicksave constantly, or to never use it at all.  I'm not sure either one was the intention.  In any case, I'm pretty sure the diabolical corner case I've now fallen into twice in one week was not intended.  Please fix it? 

 

(I have to say, one good thing that has come of this, is that when re-flying last night's mission I re-designed the ship to be about 5x better than it was... which was a nice benefit, but the real benefit was that my design process improved greatly.  Instead of the usual "slap it together and light the candle", I did several uncrewed test launches and discovered & fixed 8 or 9 serious problems in the process.  Still.  Please fix it...)

Edited October 26, 2018 by Johan-c
Removing unnecessarily inflammatory remark

[GearsNSuch]

@Johan-c

So, the quicksave system can be quite brutal if you aren't careful. I've done what you just mentioned multiple times.

The "persistent" file is overwritten as time goes on, and it also gets replaced when you load another file.

 

The solution I've found is to create a quicksave right before opening another quicksave. If anything goes wrong, you can always revert. Once you get into the habit, it'll save hours of time.

Also, this mod creates quicksaves at a customizable interval.

 

Enjoy!

 

Edited October 26, 2018 by GearsNSuch

[Johan-c]

Thanks!  Yeah I'll probably just get into the habit of quicksaving frequently in some way (like you suggest).

Then at least the worst thing that can happen when reloading, is that I don't go back quite far enough.

[swjr-swis]

10 hours ago, Johan-c said:

THEN, after poking around the interface with a growing sense of despair, I realise that there is no way to recover from this situation.

It's not exposed in-game, but the game does by default make separate backups of the savefile at regular intervals. The lacking part is that you need to go outside the game to revert to one of those backups, by copying it into the main save directory.

The settings.cfg file in the main directory of the game has the following entries (that can't be changed from within the game, you have to hand-edit these):

AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL = 300
AUTOSAVE_SHORT_INTERVAL = 30
SAVE_BACKUPS = 10

I think the above are not the defaults; I seem to remember the default saving only 5 backups, and the intervals may be different. But it's up to you to edit to your liking.

In your save directory, you'll find a 'Backups' directory that contains these regular snapshots of your savefile, named something like 'persistent (2018_10_22_18_22_33).sfs' to show the date and time of the snapshot. Make a copy of your main savefile (persistent.sfs), then copy one of those backups into the main save dir. You don't even need to rename it, once back in the game you can load it from the Esc menu (Load save..).

[Gargamel]

alt-f5 will also let you name the quicksave, so you can set your own restore points as you wish.   Alt-F9 to load.    Then if that doesn't quite work, you can try Alt-F4. 

[AVaughan]

16 hours ago, Gargamel said:

alt-f5 will also let you name the quicksave, so you can set your own restore points as you wish.   Alt-F9 to load. 

In addition, if you aren't sure how recent your latest quicksave was, then there is a fair chance that the normal autosave is more recent.  ALT-F9 will let choose which to load.