Removal of after-scenario dialogues to preferences menu

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turin
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Removal of after-scenario dialogues to preferences menu

Post by turin »

I noticed that ESR recently changed how the end-of-scenario dialogues work. Now there's only one, which just acknowledges that you won the game, and the decisions to save or not save replays, and to delete or not delete autosaves, are made in the preferences menu.

And cannot be adjusted once you've won the scenario.

I can see the logic behind this decision - it's not good bombarding the user with questions after they won a scenario - but, well, there are a million better reasons not to do it.

I don't always want to save replays, though usually I do, and I don't always want to delete autosaves, though usually I do. In normal campaign play, yeah, do both of them. But what if I'm playing a campaign and accidentally win before I wanted to, and want to go back and do a better job, say, leveling up units? This happened to me just now playing DiD - on the level Descent into Darkness, I killed the troll leader, thinking the game wouldn't end, because the objectives weren't to kill him, they were to "clear the cave of trolls". My plan was to kill him them mop experience from his remaining troops. If I had known it would make me win I wouldn't have done it. But once I won, it automatically deleted my autosaves, so now if I want to redo it and do a better job I'll have to play through the entire campaign.

And what if I'm playing a scenario for the second time, wanting to see if I can do better? If I lose, it will automatically save the replay, deleting the good replay of the scenario I'd made and substituting it with one I lost in. Similarly, I haven't tested it yet, but since it used to be that after a loss it would ask you if you want to delete autosaves, I assume it will now apply that preference after a loss. But why would I want to delete autosaves after a loss? If I lose, I want to load a save from a turn or two earlier and see if I can instead win.

And when I'm playing multiplayer I look at the game differently than single player. I always save replays after SP games, but after MP games I don't unless I thought it was a particularly interesting game, one worthy of a lasting record.

I could avoid the problem with deleting autosaves when I don't want to by setting that preference off - but then I'll get a bunch of autosaves clogging my save folder that I'll have to manually delete. Because I DON"T want most of the autosaves the game makes. And there doesn't appear to be any way to get around the problems with the saving replay option.

The basic problem with making this a global preference is that it isn't. You decide on a per-game basis whether to save a replay and whether to delete autosaves. So we shouldn't force the player to decide globally. And saying that you could always go in and change it for each scenario you play is even stupider. That takes considerably more effort that what we used to have.

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Sorry for the semi-rant, but this just ruined my game on a scenario it took my two hours to play through, so I'm really not happy.
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Unless I'm mistaken, I think esr already agreed that this isn't a good way of handling things and this feature will get reverted and the options to save replays etc will be integrated somehow into the victory dialog.
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turin
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Post by turin »

zookeeper wrote:Unless I'm mistaken, I think esr already agreed that this isn't a good way of handling things and this feature will get reverted and the options to save replays etc will be integrated somehow into the victory dialog.
Ok good. I guess that was discussed on IRC, I didn't see it on the ML or forums. I just felt like coming here and complaining about it because my game was ruined. ;)
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
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esr
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End-of-scenario options

Post by esr »

Zookeeper, you're sort of half-mistaken. At the time we last discussed this, I had reluctantly discarded the idea of having those options in the victory and defeat menus. That would ghave been mu preferred approach, but there was no clean way to pass that information out to the code that needed it. (The code near scenario ends is incredibly tangled.)

However, there is now a better solution. I implemented those two bits as user preferences -- and the end-of-scenario panel can edit those! This solves the data-management problem I was having before because I though creating private globalsa would be too ugly.
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Thinking more about this...

Post by esr »

Before I change anything major, I'd like to discuss what the Right Thing might be with both of you on IRC. Forn noew I'm going to disable replay-saving and autosave-cleaning on defeat.
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