Scheduled / condition-based auto-saves, and a managed store of save points.

[pbristow]

Hi!

There's been some discussion I see about how reverting to the last quicksave can give you a nasty shock as to how long ago you last hit the F5 key, possibly losing days or even weeks of your KSP career. On the other hand, auto-saves tend to happen so frequently that going back to the last one might not be nearly far enough back to fix the problem that just killed your crew.

In between those two extremes, we have the "revert to launch" and "revert to construction" options, which are the only points (unless you keep detailed notes with your third hand while flying eh ship with the other two!) at which you know exactly what state you will revert.

I'd like to be able to have save points created automatically at certain key stages of each mission, for example:

- When dropping any stage (or when dropping any stage using more than one decoupler - so that the last "asparagus split point" of my heavy lifter gets saved before I beuatifully finalise my parking orbit, and then totally screw up my escape burn to Minmus... );

- Whenever entering or leaving an atmosphere;

- Whenever entering or leaving a body's SOI;

- Whenever crossing any of the altitude thresholds that govern time-warp.

The examples I've picked here are all points at which the game has to "change mode" already, which avoids the performance overhead of having an extra set of conditions to check at every moment of play. It may be possible to let players set arbitrary parameterised conditions such as "when altitude exceeds 2736481m", or "when altitude is below 1km and rate of descent increases beyond 30m/s", but that probably isn't desirable from either a game play or a "keeping things challenging" standpoint. The main thing I want to is avoid having to re-play the most boring 10 to 15 minutes of each mission (you know, that long slow haul up out of the atmosphere, with a game that's lagged to blazes by the number of parts on my massive and complex lifter! ) just 'cos I botched the timing of my de-orbit burn.

For players to get the best benefit from this, though, rather than just being able to revert to the "last autosave" or even "last scheduled save", it would also be useful to be able to select from a list of the last *several* saves. The saves would each need to be identified by a time-stamp and a brief description (e.g. "Activating stage: 3"; "Entering atmosphere: Kerbin"; "Leaving SOI: Minmus"; or the two existing options "Manual Quick-save" and "Auto-save").

Thoughts? Ideas? Raspberries?

[vexx32]

I'm not overly fond of this idea, myself. Yes, the quicksave system needs a bit of a sanity check, so people don't load up a quicksave from last year by accident, but... if you haven't done a quicksave and confirmed it quicksaved properly, why would you be using the quickload anyway? Quicksave already does everything you're asking of this system, except multiple saves... which could be the single part of it which might actually solve something. Rather than have the game keep six autosaves at every damn point in the game, you could just keep the last few quicksaves. That way, you also don't have the extra performance hit of being forced to make a save right when the game is changing state, which can often give a reasonably noticeable stutter anyway.

[zepi]

By accident or by misunderstanding the autosave / quick save functionality. I just lost dozens of hours of gameplay over a week of IRL time because I held F9 for too long. I was under a firm belief that I'd be transferred back in time by some 5 minutes to my last launch or something (latest autosave) but was hurled trough time an eon instead.

I was just about to pour myself a huge shot of whiskey, delete the whole game and curse Squad into oblivion until I realised I have incremental daily backups from my machine thanks to lovely Time Machine of OSX. Now instead I'll pour a huge whiskey and salute Steve Job's ghost instead. Thank you Apple for saving my butt...

Please, for the love of god, change the quick load / autosave system!

Preferably in a such way that triggering a quick load will not destroy your latest autosave. Or at least pop a dialog box "Do you really want to load quick save from (date three weeks past)" before you let people destroy everything they've built and achieved.

We are humans (kerbals), and bound to make mistakes. Don't punish us too hard for those mistakes.

[Greenspan]

Yeah, I don't know about the game saving every time something happens, I think that's part of the challenge of the game. If you find yourself at a truly critical point you can manually quicksave.

I agree with zepi, right now it's WAAAYYY too easy to get mixed up and end up accidently erasing a ton of work. If nothing else, a timestamp simmilar to the one you get when you revert a flight is needed. Or perhaps when you load a save, have the game automatically save at the point your loading from, so if you find you went back to far you can always reload and go back to where you came from.

Had this happen to me once or twice, very annoying and like zepi said can make people so frustrated they will quit, luckly mine weren't too bad but something, even something minor, should be done.