why are all autosaves gone?

[scott]

but you can not ignore it! Who do you ignore the fact that savegames are lost? How do you ignore the fact, that you can't just go back to the end of the last turn to repair something you forgot, but to go back SEVERAL turns?

Woah. First of all, relax. Second of all, we're talking about different versions. All of that has already been fixed in SVN. There is always an autosave present, just like before.

The functionality has already changed. I am also very used to end-of-turn autosaves. Beginning-of-turn autosaves were suggested long ago as a user feature to replace end-of-turn autosaves as a dev feature. Here they are. There is no issue with the regular autosave since once you start any turn, that autosave is already toast.

no.
The end-of-turn autosave is toast, when you end another turn. As long as you don't hit 'end of turn', it stayed. And that was a good thing. Now you don't have to just go back one step and retry. No, in worst case, you have to go three steps back! That really, really sucks.

Again, 1. we're talking different versions again and 2. I also prefer the end-of-turn autosave because I, too, am used to it. However, either way is fine with me, and I'm willing to move from a more dev-oriented scheme to a more player-oriented scheme. It's annoying to have to replay the entire turn again when I just want the AI to roll worse, but hey it's what we get nowadays. I can see how one would feel robbed under the old scheme, but there's no point arguing over how the game used to be.

When I edit a document, it's nice to have 16 .tmp files littering my working directory, but I don't want them there all the time. I want the app to clean them up! Once these temp files come from 5 different documents ranging over several weeks, they become just plain litter. So it is with by-turn autosaves.

so remove them. By hand. There is nothing that stops youi from removing the temp files you don't need anymore. But how can an editor, or wesnoth decide, which temp files/savegames are needed and which are not?

It can't and that is why it should not touch them, without asking!

If there is a save you might want to reload, I recommend you save it yourself. You want the game to automatically guess when you might want to save, but you don't want it to also automatically guess when you might want to clean up? Autosave/autodelete, Manual save/manual delete.

great, I see that I made a mistake earlier in the level. Was it 4? 6 or turn7?

I can't just visit each of them, because if I choose 4, 7 is gone. And when you are at turn 9 already 5 lost turns are a lot!

No application should remove usermade data. Savegames ARE usermade data.
Why is that so hard to understand? Do not touch savegames.

And bring back end-of-turn autosave... together with the other one, I don't care. But do never ever remove anything without asking AND confirmation.

1. I don't know what makes you so entitled. If you want to save every turn, just save your game every turn. If you want me to manually delete all of these trash files, I don't see why you shouldn't save the game yourself when you want a saved game.
2. By-turn autosaves are a convenience to help save you time in doing #1. However, if they also become a nuisance in the process, then I say good riddance. If saving every few turns is how you play, you should be used to already saving every few turns. The loss of functionality is illusory since you have always been and continue to be 100% free to save whenever you want. No one is telling you how to play.
3. I am still baffled at the vehemence with which by-turn autosaves are defended as a new independent feature, but it may be in the context of not having normal autosaves (thus it's not independent). Right?
4. So when the computer decides to save a game, how is that user made? Did you, the user, tell the computer to save the game? No? Hmm...

However, none of that is really relevant to actually solving the issue. I think several fine suggestions have already been floated.
1. Go back to the old way. That's fine with me just on general principle, but it doesn't open the floor to better ways

2. Darth Fool's idea is pretty good, except when you're debugging something you may never win a level. You may fire up someone's saved game to reproduce an error, test a WML snippet, or test new graphics. I open up start-of-level saves very frequently and just play the first few turns to see the dialog and how the AI goes through its opening book. Some scenarios don't even have proper victory events. Not only does your save list get very cluttered, very quickly these old autosaves lose their relevance.

3. There is my idea of only deleting autosaves when you open a start-of-scenario saved game. It's not perfect, but this is the most likely time when you are done with the previous scenario's autosaves or are going to try to play the level over again. This method, incidentally cramps my style - when I test a scenario with branching, I win the scenario one way, go back to the autosave, and win the other way. With start-of-turn autosaves and scenario-start-autosave-deleting, I will just have to remember to save my own game before winning.

4. Make a preference to switch between start-of-turn and end-of-turn autosaves. It doesn't address deleting by-turn autosaves, but I can see this as a legit preference.

5. There are other ways of managing autosaves. In combination with 2 or 3, you can add a checkbox to the save game dialog or scenario start dialog that says "delete autosaves" and you can keep it checked or unchecked depending on how you play. Alternately, there could be a button on the load game dialog that says "delete autosaves" that would address my main complaint.

What are your suggestions?

[rusty]

I would suggest the following change: label autosaves with the name of the scenario, something like "Autosave-Turn3-The_Elves_Besieged.cfg". Delete Autosaves from Autosave-*-The_Elves_Besieged.cfg when and only when you complete the scenario victorious and are presented with the option to save your progress in a non-auto-save file. Defeats would not delete the autosaves. Change the question to something like "Autosaves for scenario deleted. Save game now?"

I like this because it doesn't add a third (!) question at the end of every scenario. However, I changed the question to "Do you want to save your game? (Also erases Auto-Save files)", so if they say "no", we don't delete autosaves, either.

I've also now implemented (but not checked in) Auto-Saves every turn: it's just that the menu will only show up to five at a time: the beginning of this turn, the beginning of the previous turn, a third of the way back to the beginning of scenario, two-thirds of the way back, the start of the scenario. Of course, the Load Game menu will show all the saves. Multi-player games will use the old overwritten-every-time Auto-Save file.

There needs to be some consequences for your actions: this is the same reason that some actions are not undoable. But it is also a game, and forcing people to replay from the start because they made a mistake is too far to the other extreme. The previous Auto-Save gave you two choices: reload Auto-Save and hope AI gets unlucky, or go back to start of scenario. The new one is a compromise: you can go back and change your actions in various degrees.

I realize that, like all compromises, it will not please everybody. But I hope we can all live this scheme.

Thankyou very much for your input!
Rusty.

[xtifr]

I realize that, like all compromises, it will not please everybody.

I am extremely dissatisfied! I DEMAND my money back!!

Seriously, this sounds like a decent and interesting compromise. I only have two (very minor) issues. One: is this going to be too confusing? I certainly found the description rather confusing at first, but I realize that some things are easier to understand if you see them than if you hear them described. But I really can't tell if this is one of those or not. Two: could having so many autosave files around possibly take up too much disk space? I realize this is a non-issue for most people, but there are people around with old, small machines, and some of them might just barely have enough room for Wesnoth as it stands. So it might, just barely, be worth having an option to turn off the extra autosaves. Or it might not; I dunno.

[pjr]

There are two uses for autosaves.

The first is to be able to retrace one's steps after making a stupid mistake. This used to require manual saving, which it was easy to forget to do in the heat of battle - and it's a new autosave feature for which the developers deserve thanks, even if the first implementation hasn't been to everybody's liking.

The second is to recover from crashes. As far as I can tell, this is working much the way it used to (at least in SVN).

So I think it's all working out pretty well for us ordinary users. If we're too rude to the people who created, improve and maintain this game for us free of charge, what will happen?

[Gleeson]

I have two thoughts on this whole discussion. (But let me preface them by tendering my heartfelt compliments and gratitude to the fine team of Wesnoth developers. You guys rock.)

1. Every savegame already includes every move that was made by every player, from turn 1 to the end. (That's why it's possible to save the "Replay.") So, why can't you code it to "rewind" back to any particular turn, without an auto-save? For instance, when the player selects "go back to turn 3," why can't the program just look up the moves from turns 1 and 2 to reconstruct the start of turn 3? If it worked this way, then much of this dissention about auto-saves would vanish.

2. And speaking of Replays: I know for a fact that in earlier versions, it was possible to export a savegame file from a Replay file, at pretty much any point in the action. For example, I could be playing a replay file, stop it at turn 3, and save it, so I could open it and play it from that point. Apparently, this functionality has been removed, but I can't really imagine why. Again, if this were to be restored, it would rescue all the people who accidentally deleted all of their auto-saves.

[irrevenant]

Turns out there were two other unintended side-effects from the new AutoSave code. Saving at the start made people notice how slow saving is, esp. in multiplayer games.

Can you please clarify this? What is the difference between saving at the end of the turn and saving at the beginning of the turn? Surely either way it occurs between turns?

BTW, I assume that the most obvious way of addressing the problem - make games save faster - is technically infeasible?

Now, the reason we eliminate earlier saves when loading a non-AutoSave is so we don't get confused if you load a completely different game and we think that those AutoSaveXXX files are previous turns in this just-loaded game. How do we fix this?

I agree with the solution of making it more obvious which level/campaign the saved game represents; either through the savefile name or some other feedback.

P.S. Could this thread please be moved to Ideas or some other appropriate forum?

[Haimar]

[quote="irrevenant]
Can you please clarify this? What is the difference between saving at the end of the turn and saving at the beginning of the turn? Surely either way it occurs between turns?
[/quote]

For Campaigns it is better to save at the end of my turn because very often the game crashes at the AI-turn - and after reload it works without doing my turn 2-times.

BTW. the 1.1.5 (WIN) is much better than 1.1.3 or 1.1.4 - I love it!

[Elvish_Pillager]

I like this because it doesn't add a third (!) question at the end of every scenario. However, I changed the question to "Do you want to save your game? (Also erases Auto-Save files)", so if they say "no", we don't delete autosaves, either.

I want my money back too!

No seriously - it doesn't help the "third question" thing. The way you implemented it, there are still three questions, just stuck into two and not allowing some answer possibilities.

My suggestion: Have a checkbox in the save-game box, checked by default, "Delete autosaves".