Quickload is broken

[Not a Cylon]

I've seen a few posts where someone describes hitting F9 and losing days of progress as PEBKAC - i.e. the user's fault. This is [insert stream of profanity here]. It is an atrocity of design to let a single keystroke undo arbitrary amounts of progress. This is a bug, and about as serious as a bug can get. The kind of bug that loses players. The kind of bug that makes "v1.0" a sick joke.

In the name of all that is fun, please fix this bug.

[FuzzyLlama]

Not a bug. You have to hold F9 down for a few seconds to load, and you have to be careful to know what you are loading. It is PEBKAC if you load the wrong save. Alt+F4 and load your most recent persistent if you make an oopsie.

IMO, it isn't "quickload" if it prompts you after you press the button.

Does Skyrim ask you when you press F9? No. It just loads.

[jwenting]

correct, it works just fine. If you keep F9 down long enough for the quickload to kick in, and don't realise that it loads a quicksave from 2 weeks ago because that's the last time you bothered to use F5, you've only yourself to blame.

[pandaman]

4 hours ago, jwenting said:

correct, it works just fine. If you keep F9 down long enough for the quickload to kick in, and don't realise that it loads a quicksave from 2 weeks ago because that's the last time you bothered to use F5, you've only yourself to blame.

This ^^

It does work as intended, quickload (f9) loads the last quicksave (f5) which can be far older than the last time that you closed the game and saved it normally.  I've not used it myself (though I really should), but you can create named saves (I thinks it's Altf5 to create and Altf9 to load).

Edit...  I do think this should be addressed though.  Evan a simple warning/confirmation/check dialogue before committing to quickload would help.

Edited December 28, 2015 by pandaman

[cantab]

I posted about this last month: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/124291-protect-against-progress-loss-by-loading-old-quicksave

That it's been brought up again indicates it's an issue. As Not A Cylon mentioned the problem is that loading the quicksave which may be from a long time ago instantly and permanently overwrites the recent autosave.

I know the kind of things that will be said:

"You should have had backups" - yes, you should, but most people don't.

"You should have read the manual" - what manual? Anyway many people don't. Even if there was a manual and someone did read it, the subtle distinction between quicksave and autosave and how quickload relates to that might not be understood.

"You shouldn't have had that momentary mental lapse that let you quickload when you hadn't quicksave" - Whatever Mr. Perfect.

"Other games do it the same way" - Well firstly *do* they? Do they let you quickload a two-month-old save and permanently lose all subsequent progress? Secondly this is a supportive argument but not an absolute one, and I'd note that KSP has been successful by not following the crowd.

As I see it the bottom line is that KSP is giving players the rope to hang themselves and it doesn't need to. There are any number of ways to better handle this.

[monstah]

I agree it's not a bug, but it is annoying and could be mitigated.

For one thing, it shouldn't delete your autosave. That way you can do alt-f9 and load it again if you loaded the wrong save, swallow your pride and keep playing from your last fail (which is still better than rolling your save back a couple months).

Edited December 28, 2015 by monstah

[steve_v]

3 hours ago, pandaman said:

Evan a simple warning/confirmation/check dialogue before committing to quickload would help.

It would, but it just turns "quickload" into another "load" - the whole point of quickload is that it's quick. I wouldn't be opposed to the idea, so long as the confirmation a: does something useful, like shows the date of the file to load, and b: can be dismissed instantly with a single keypress (not a clicky button requiring the mouse). Maybe something like: first press of f9 opens dialog with last quicksave date (and ideally screenshot), esc cancels, second press of f9 loads.

2 hours ago, cantab said:

"Other games do it the same way" - Well firstly *do* they? Do they let you quickload a two-month-old save and permanently lose all subsequent progress?

Well yes, AFAIK. The quicksave system in any game I can think of is nothing more than another save slot/file, bound to quick keys. Most don't even have the "hold f9" safeguard. I do vaguely recall seeing a "warning, your last quicksave was X hours ago, are you sure" type message, but I can't recall where.
This generally isn't a problem though, as most other games create permanent autosaves on a regular basis - important game events, area transitions etc. Even if you do quickload by mistake, there are plenty of recent saves to fall back on and progress lost is minimal.

To my mind, a better solution than departing from this pseudo-standard would be to improve the autosave system - make a number of autosaves at intervals (and possibly events, eg pre-launch, leaving/entering atmo, soi transition, docking etc.), and allow the player to go back and load one if they accidentally hit f9. The problem isn't so much that quickload allows you to load a really old save, but that it also overwrites the single autosave slot seconds after you do so.
There's a mod for this, but something in the stock game would be nice.

 

Also:

12 hours ago, Not a Cylon said:

This is a bug

This is intended behaviour, and therefore by definition not a bug.

Edited December 28, 2015 by steve_v

[Not a Cylon]

Bug, misfeature, whatever; it's a serious issue. It should never be this easy to lose that much data. Needing to hold F9 is a good idea, but it doesn't help if I think I've quicksaved recently but haven't.

PEBKAC is no excuse for bad design. Three Mile Island was PEBKAC. At the end of the day, if the game is ruined for me, it doesn't matter if it's my error that was the proximate cause. Good games (and good software in general) don't make these errors easy to make.

What differentiates KSP from most games here is that most games keep their quickload and their autosave synchronous - quickload usually goes back to the previous quicksave or autosave. Hence quickload never goes back farther than some sort of logical checkpoint, which in this case would be the launch. It's a subtle difference, yet it's crucial.

In the interest of constructiveness, I can see several solutions:

• There could be a warning when F9 would load a previous launch. "Are you sure?" is a design crutch, but it would help (as crutches usually do).
• F9 could go back to the latest quicksave or the beginning of the launch, whichever is later. Almost equivalently, the game could automatically quicksave at launch. (This may bite people who expect the current behavior, of course.)
• There could be easy access to, say, the last five autosaves. This would be nice in general but presumably would need a bit more development effort.

[sal_vager]

If KSP loaded the last autosave, and had just autosaved at a point when it's too late to avoid catastrophe, what would to say then?

Alt+F9 (rightshift on Linux, command key on Mac) opens the load menu allowing you to choose which to load, I suggest you try it, and alt+F5 to create named saves.

[steve_v]

3 hours ago, Not a Cylon said:

There could be easy access to, say, the last five autosaves. This would be nice in general but presumably would need a bit more development effort.

I don't see why - there's a periodic autosave implemented already, just grab the current system time and append it to the save name. You might need to clean up after a certain number of saves, but this isn't exactly rocket science either.

43 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

If KSP loaded the last autosave, and had just autosaved at a point when it's too late to avoid catastrophe, what would to say then?

Ideally, I'd say: "No worries, I'll just load the previous autosave"... but as it stands, it's more likely to be: "Why the **** is there only one autosave?"

43 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

Alt+F9 (rightshift on Linux, command key on Mac) opens the load menu allowing you to choose which to load

Cool, awesome. Totally useless if you forgot to make a named save to load from.

This whole problem doesn't happen in other games, because there are multiple autosave slots, or regular level/area transitions that trigger saves.
No amount or PEBKAC short of intentionally deleting those save points will loose you more than a small amount of progress.
As we don't have easily defined save points in KSP, what's the problem with simply making a bunch of autosaves at intervals? Save files are small and disk is cheap.

The problem could, as you say, just as easily be a save that is too recent rather than too old. So give us more saves to choose from, and try not to penalise those that forget to make them manually.

My current play style involves (named)saving before I do anything. Partially because of bugs - e.g. I never know when my craft will fail to undock or a base will randomly leap into the sky and explode - and partially because the autosave system is utterly brain-dead - it's quite likely to save just as said base explodes and there's no fallback unless you create one manually.
 

Edited December 29, 2015 by steve_v

[monstah]

5 hours ago, Not a Cylon said:

PEBKAC is no excuse for bad design. Three Mile Island was PEBKAC. At the end of the day, if the game is ruined for me, it doesn't matter if it's my error that was the proximate cause. Good games (and good software in general) don't make these errors easy to make.

This a thousand times.

[Michaelo90]

What about a confirmation window that also gives you a timestamp for the quicksave you are trying to load?

[Mystique]

17 minutes ago, Michaelo90 said:

What about a confirmation window that also gives you a timestamp for the quicksave you are trying to load?

Yup, could be also cool to have it adjustable in options. Like: "warn me if I'm trying to load quicksave that's more than X hours old; otherwise load as usual". That way it'll work as safety warning and also won't turn quickload into severalbuttonsslowload.

[monstah]

As some said, the point of a quickload is to not have any hassle except pressing a button. It just shouldn't overwrite your only autosave instantly, that's all.

[cantab]

On 28/12/2015 at 3:03 PM, steve_v said:

17 hours ago, sal_vager said:

If KSP loaded the last autosave, and had just autosaved at a point when it's too late to avoid catastrophe, what would to say then?

It would, but it just turns "quickload" into another "load" - the whole point of quickload is that it's quick.

I don't even know what this forum's quote system is doing.

Sal, I'd just say that basically makes semi-ironman the norm.

Otherwise, one thing I note is that KSP does an abysmal  job of exposing what it calls "named saves". When you do a normal game start the only option given is to load the last autosaves from each playthrough - the game fails to show all the saves you actually have. In the Space Centre screen you can choose "save game" from the Esc menu and get prompted for a name, but there's no indication of what names you've already used! When you're in flight that option is absent from the Esc menu, and can only be reached by Alt+F5, a key combination that is not only obscure but is just begging the player to hit Alt+F4 instead and close without saving at all!

Utterly, utterly abysmal.

[jwbrase]

On Monday December 28, 2015 at 9:03 AM, steve_v said:

It would, but it just turns "quickload" into another "load" - the whole point of quickload is that it's quick. I wouldn't be opposed to the idea, so long as the confirmation a: does something useful, like shows the date of the file to load, and b: can be dismissed instantly with a single keypress (not a clicky button requiring the mouse). Maybe something like: first press of f9 opens dialog with last quicksave date (and ideally screenshot), esc cancels, second press of f9 loads.

The way I'd do it would be to keep the existing system, with the addition of displaying a message:

"F9 pressed. Quicksave from [date] will be loaded in [countdown] seconds. Hold F9 to continue, release to cancel."
 

[Not a Cylon]

UGH. Also hating the fact that you can't revert a flight once you've quickloaded. That's another thing no other game does - loading should never destroy anything (besides the current game state).

[sal_vager]

7 hours ago, cantab said:

I don't even know what this forum's quote system is doing.

Sal, I'd just say that basically makes semi-ironman the norm.

Otherwise, one thing I note is that KSP does an abysmal  job of exposing what it calls "named saves". When you do a normal game start the only option given is to load the last autosaves from each playthrough - the game fails to show all the saves you actually have. In the Space Centre screen you can choose "save game" from the Esc menu and get prompted for a name, but there's no indication of what names you've already used! When you're in flight that option is absent from the Esc menu, and can only be reached by Alt+F5, a key combination that is not only obscure but is just begging the player to hit Alt+F4 instead and close without saving at all!

Utterly, utterly abysmal.

Yeah I know, really the save and load buttons should be in the flight scene pause menu, not just at the KSC.

I've asked for it on the tracker and can ask Ted to mention it to the devs, as these buttons and their code already exists I hope it'd not be too much work to add them to the in-flight menu.

Here's my ugly awesome mock-up of what it might look like.

Spoiler

[MarvinKitFox]

Leave quickload exactly as it is.

 

Change the functionality of Quicksave (and autosave) to leave a 3-deep backup of saves, with the 2 older ones only accessible from the main menu.

 

So when you DO forget to save, and do a 2-week old quickload, you still have your previous 3 autosaves to back you up.

And when you quicksave, but the situation proves unexpectedly 100% lethal, you have the option of going a step further back.

 

This single, simple change will totally satisfy all of the above complaints.

[pokeman]

On 30/12/2015 at 5:06 AM, MarvinKitFox said:

Leave quickload exactly as it is.

 

Change the functionality of Quicksave (and autosave) to leave a 3-deep backup of saves, with the 2 older ones only accessible from the main menu.

 

So when you DO forget to save, and do a 2-week old quickload, you still have your previous 3 autosaves to back you up.

And when you quicksave, but the situation proves unexpectedly 100% lethal, you have the option of going a step further back.

 

This single, simple change will totally satisfy all of the above complaints.

Yep this sounds good to me. Just having the game store a couple of previous quicksaves/autosaves you can avoid the problem with no extra hassle on quickloads. 

[StarManta]

This would be a shockingly easy problem to fix. Right now when you hold F9, it says "Hold F9 to load the last quicksave". All you need to do is change that text to "Hold F9 to load the quicksave from X weeks/hours/days ago" - and if that time is more than an hour or two, it blinks yellow/red.

[Hotaru]

I have to agree this is poor design, PEBKAC or no. The main reason being that the simple act of loading a quicksave--even if you immediately alt-F4 out--overwrites the persistence file, preventing you from any hope of correcting the mistake.

The way Skyrim gets around this is by keeping three autosaves, autosaving fairly frequently (depending on settings, it can be when you sleep, go through a door, enter a menu, or just are idle for a while), and not overwriting the last autosave every time you reload. No matter how many problems may have occurred between my chair and keyboard, or anywhere else, I've never lost more than a half-hour or so of progress in that game--whereas in KSP, it's much easier to lose many hours of work just by neglecting to hit F5 for a while.

 

Minor, unrelated, and utterly trivial point: for some stupid reason it's always bothered me that the game reports "Quicksaving" both when you hit F5 and when you use alt-F5 to make a hard save. A hard save is the exact opposite of a quicksave, the entire point of it is it gets kept no matter what, as opposed to a quicksave which is overwritten the next time you hit F5. It really should just say "Saving" with alt-F5, I would think.

[fr33soul]

it will be better if the load and save windows will have some chronological filters like date and time, otherwise it's very hard to understand what's the last saved game for instance..