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Playing without quicksaves enabled- bad idea?


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I've been thinking I'm kind of taking away from the spirit of the game, ie rocket crashes, stranding Kerbals, etc. by relying on the F5 button. Usually when this comes up here on the forums it's "just in case Kraken happens," but the game seems to save pretty often. I've yet to actually experience any crashes at detrimental times, but, if they were to happen when playing without quicksaves, how much time would actually be lost? How gracefully does KSP handle such moments?

Edited by Waxing_Kibbous
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I think that KSP autosaves fairly often and I too use F5 a lot, so playing without using quicksaves actually sounds like a good idea. Im going to start a career without quick saving as it will certainly up the tension levels :)

I hadn't thought about this before so thanks for the idea!

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There might be one "perfect storm" scenario: I very occasionally find that a quicksave I load has a kerbal falling through the ground, or a ship mid explosion. When that happens I am glad that I have another save usually very recently. You might run into the situation where the game crashes and the persistent save is useless for some reason. But I think that is so unlikely that it is probably not worth bothering about. 

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Well, I disagress with @ineon, On my 1.0.4 career game, I had :

  • 2 vanishing ships
  • 1 flag disappearance (I took great care with positioning this one...)
  • 1 space station explosive wobble
  • 1 partially dysfunctional lander (legs not working)
  • Several "warp to next node" that didn't stopped (5 or 6 before I stopped using this feature)
  • 1 Kerbal / Ship collision bug that partially blow the lander (Now I keep clear of the landing struts...)

I keep numerous persistent.sfs backup files (before a new mission, before SOI change, before docking/undocking manoeuvres, before EVA while landed...)

 

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10 hours ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

I've been thinking I'm kind of taking away from the spirit of the game, ie rocket crashes, stranding Kerbals, etc. by relying on the F5 button. Usually when this comes up here on the forums it's "just in case Kraken happens," but the game seems to save pretty often. I've yet to actually experience any crashes at detrimental times, but, if they were to happen when playing without quicksaves, how much time would actually be lost? How gracefully does KSP handle such moments?

I don't know the official parameters of the autosave mechanism but here is what I have observed:

  • It autosaves when you change scene (ship to KSC), jump between different ships via tracking center or map view "switch to" (but not [ and ] in the world view), if a Kerbal EVAs/boards, and when ships dock (but no undock).
  • It autosaves at the end of burns that change the "regime" your ship is in or will pass through (suborbital, low orbit, high orbit, a different SOI, etc.).  IOW, if you're in low orbit and do a big prograde (for a transfer) or retrograde (to land) burn, it will autosave once the burn is over.  But it won't autosave after small burns that only adjust your position within your current regime.
  • It autosaves when you cross SOI boundaries with the active ship, but not when inactive ships cross.
  • I have NOT observed any other triggers for autosaves, including the passage of real time.

If you rely on autosaves alone, therefore, it's quite possible to lose quite a lot.  Such as long coasting transfers between planets, doing multiple rescues in LKO, multiple biome hops on Minmus, long atmospheric flights, long rover drives, etc.

However, the biggest issue with not using quicksaves/quickloads is aerobraking.  You can't do paper calculations to predict where you'll end up if your Pe is at a given height, the the stock map view doesn't display the effects of atmospheres at all, and even the Trajectories mod only provides an estimate.  Thus, the only way at present to end up where you want after an atmospheric pass is trial and error via F5/F9.  If you have quicksaves disabled, you're therefore condemned to 1 attempt and being stuck with the results whatever they are.  Which is silly and unrealistic.  If the Kerbals were smart enough to build the rocket in the 1st place, surely they're smart enough to calculate/simulate aerobraking, especially if the whole mission design depends on it.

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@Geschosskopf, most of what you described ("Switch to" button, autosaves/backups...) are a KAC mod feature.

In stock game, only persistent.sfs is saved when you load/unload a scene. The "Revert" button reloads the persistent.sfs file and is not allowed if you changed scene before (preference.sfs was updated).

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Relying on autosave is good for kraken protection and actual game crashes, but it's a terrible protection for anything else.  In particular, it's really not a substitute for the usual F5 reason of "okay, something I really don't like just happened, let me try again", because Murphy's Law ensures that it will decide to do an autosave right after the bad thing happens.

You can make your own decisions about what you like, of course, but I have to say I would never do this.  For me, at least:  Lack of quicksave isn't really a problem for near-Kerbin operations.  If something goes wrong, I haven't invested that much of my time in it, so I just launch again and do my best.  And at this point, I've done just about everything you can possibly do around Kerbin/Mun/Minmus, so many times, that my likelihood of mission failure approaches zero.

However:

When I go on a really long, extended mission-- e.g. exploring Jool and its moons, for example-- and I've invested many hours of effort in getting to a certain point, and then it all goes down the tubes and I have to start from scratch because of some stupid little oversight-- that's the point at which it becomes seriously un-fun for me.  If KSP didn't have a quicksave option, I would have quit in disgust after a month or so of playing, instead of still being hopelessly addicted to it after a couple of years.

That would kill the enjoyment of my gameplay.  I would get excessively careful about risk and play KSP in a very timid and un-fun fashion, because I'd be so focused on "don't ruin the 5 hours of effort I just put in" that I'd lose track of the fun I'm about to experience.  The temptation to over-engineer everything so that it can't possibly go wrong would be irresistible to me.  And I wouldn't "push the envelope" with interestingly risky misions.

And worst of all, I'd lose out on so many of the "Apollo 13" moments that make KSP so fun for me.  A restore-to-quicksave will save me from accidents and unfortunate flight events, but it doesn't save me from engineering constraints:  I'm stuck with whatever components I built into the ship.

This strip says it all.  This is a big part of what KSP does for me.

So I frequently have the problem of, "Okay, I tried <difficult task> and <bad thing> happened because I <designed it wrong on a bad assumption>.  I'm stuck with the ship in its current form.  So what clever thing can I do with just the components on hand, in order to pull this out of the hole?"  (Example:  Eve lander descending, pop the chutes, WHAM and it yanks off the top of the lander while most of the mass goes plummeting to the surface.  Oh crap.  I've already staged them and can't disarm them because it's pre-1.0.5.  Okay, restore to a few minutes ago, and feverishly scurry around all the parachutes to give them different deployment altitudes so it only opens a few at a time.  Example: interplanetary transfer ship with asparagus-staged drop tanks turns out not to have quite enough dV.  So eke out a smidgeon more by dropping tanks one by one instead of in pairs, except that now the ship is lopsided so I have to run at really low thrust, which causes other problems that I have to fix by doing something else to adapt, and...)  I absolutely adore that aspect of KSP, and not being able to restore to a quicksave would totally kill it for me.  Instead of coming up with a clever way to save the situation with the current ship, I would just go back to square one and build a boringly over-engineered, over-cautious ship and start all over again.

So, there's no way I would even consider turning off quicksave.  It would ruin the game for me.  But that's just me:  every player is different and gets his or her KSP jollies in individual fashion, so the only real answer to your question is, try it and see how you like it.  :)

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Do note that the setting doesn't disabling quicksave, it disables quickload. You can always make backups using F5 or Alt-F5 (for named quicksaves), you just can't load them without swapping out the persistent.sfs file or changing that setting. So you can always make periodic backups while in game just in case there's a bug that strikes.

The "autosave" functionality of Stock is pretty terrible. All it does is overwrite the current save and if it writes some bad data then you've permanently lost your save file (you can do some surgery to snip out the bad parts, but that's dangerous too). I absolutely do not recommend relying entirely on that. Either make periodic quicksaves still, manually backup your save before/after every game session (I do this even with quicksaves and extra mods), or use a mod such as S.A.V.E. or DatedQuicksaves (which also has an autosave feature) to make automatic backups.

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1 hour ago, Warzouz said:

@Geschosskopf, most of what you described ("Switch to" button, autosaves/backups...) are a KAC mod feature.

In stock game, only persistent.sfs is saved when you load/unload a scene. The "Revert" button reloads the persistent.sfs file and is not allowed if you changed scene before (preference.sfs was updated).

Autosaving does happen quite a lot in stock game, and Geschosskopf's list seems to tally quite closely to what I've observed. It's something that has frustrated me when something daft occurs (e.g. change SOI on too high warp and find trajectory is not at all what it was supposed to be, accidentally pressing Z on returning to orbit and using up far too much fuel) and I find that pausing the game and backing up persistent.sfs is pointless because it's already been updated.

edit: actually, I'm wondering if I completely missed the point of what you're saying here... if so nvm

Edited by Plusck
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Thanks for the replies- what I am coming away with is like any other endeavour where much time is invested it's good to make backups, and that backup should be the persistent file.

From a gameplay standpoint I want the mistakes to happen, mostly for the extra fun and challenge- I've been too conservative with my Kerbonauts, it's time to see what they are made of (both figuratively and literally :P )

 

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7 hours ago, Warzouz said:

@Geschosskopf, most of what you described ("Switch to" button, autosaves/backups...) are a KAC mod feature.

In stock game, only persistent.sfs is saved when you load/unload a scene. The "Revert" button reloads the persistent.sfs file and is not allowed if you changed scene before (preference.sfs was updated).

All wrong.

Switch to, autosaves, are all stock. Switch to appears as the bottom button when clicking a ship in map view, under "set as target" button. Autosave is about saving into persistent.sfs (not zKACblahblah.sfs), where bottom right corner shows "Autosaving" text (you'll see Quicksaving at the same place when hitting F5).

Nope revert is available after persistent.sfs is updated as long as you don't leave the ship. An obvious proof is that when you first get to LKO when engine is cut after circularization burn, persistent.sfs must be updated, but you're still able to revert after that.

Edited by FancyMouse
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9 hours ago, Warzouz said:

@Geschosskopf, most of what you described ("Switch to" button, autosaves/backups...) are a KAC mod feature.

In stock game, only persistent.sfs is saved when you load/unload a scene. The "Revert" button reloads the persistent.sfs file and is not allowed if you changed scene before (preference.sfs was updated).

Really?  Wow, never realized.  I thought KAC let you "jump to" ships from the alarm list but the "switch to" on the map view was stock.  But anyway, if most of when I said the game autosaves are actually KAC features, then going without quicksaves is totally a bad idea because the stock game might not autosave for years of gametime.  Besides the aerobraking issue, not to mention the game just crashing for no good reason, which it does.

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I swear by no-quickload play, it makes me feel so much more involved in my missions.

Now there is an important rider: I have my KSP folder routinely backed up. My chosen program automatically scans it for changes every X minutes half hour and keeps all versions of files. So if I hit a serious bug I can restore from the backup and lose no more than X minutes of progress. If I realise my beloved space station has gone AWOL I can hunt through and find the last save when it was still present. The craft files are covered too, so if I mistakenly delete or overwrite one I wanted I can restore it. And I've done all three of those in my KSPing. Set up automatic backups and make sure you can restore them.

I do still hit F5 if I'm expecting bugs, and can temporarily enable quickloads in the Alt+F12 menu, which is more streamlined than messing with my backup program. But having F9 disabled by default discourages using it without thinking.

There's another practical gotcha - expect fewer successes. I've come back from Tylo and Moho but never returned a Kerbal from Duna, because I've only ever attempted Duna in saves I was playing no-quickloads on. To return a probe from the surface of the mod planet Serran (between Duna and Laythe in properties) took seven missions, while getting a Kerbal there and back involved a further four.

Edited by cantab
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I once had a Mun Lander get an attack from the Kraken... Booom... no more engine and the lander was stranded and kerbals would die. I've enabled loading quicksaves ever since.

Also its not cheaty if I want to put the game down for a bit but have a 5 hour flight to reach some biome on Kerbin (badlands).

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