Wesnoth 1.1.5

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Yogibear
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Post by Yogibear »

flava_clown wrote: i think one big problem with the saving is, that you save now much more informations than before. one unit have now every information you can think about. do we really need the movement costs for every single unit in a save game? or the residence? the max hp, max xp, alpha and what else? for what are the unit files then? and for what are the movement types? i mean in older save games there were only the necessary informations to a unit and things that aren't "normal" for this unit type.
The reason for this is replay compatibility. If unit stats like movement, resilience, hitpoints, xp etc change from one version to the other, all older replays containing that unit are almost for sure broken (that is they suffer from out of sync messages). Having that information in the savegame enables you to watch an older replay with a newer version of wesnoth.

Nevertheless it's a fact that savegames have grown a lot because of that and we have to think severely if we keep it this way or not.
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turin
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Post by turin »

Yogi Bear wrote:Nevertheless it's a fact that savegames have grown a lot because of that and we have to think severely if we keep it this way or not.
This is my non-programming mind speaking... would it not be possible to only have the replays store all that data, and have normal saves as they used to be? That would require two different saving mechanisms, and it would make replays actually be different from other saves, but I don't see those as huge problems.

You would still get an OOS if you saved a scenario and loaded it under a different version, but that's not a huge problem, methinks.
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Xan
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Post by Xan »

Yogi Bear wrote:Nevertheless it's a fact that savegames have grown a lot because of that and we have to think severely if we keep it this way or not.
Actually, I've never seen a replay where the unit data takes up more space than the replay data.
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Post by flava_clown »

Yogi Bear wrote:
The reason for this is replay compatibility. If unit stats like movement, resilience, hitpoints, xp etc change from one version to the other, all older replays containing that unit are almost for sure broken (that is they suffer from out of sync messages). Having that information in the savegame enables you to watch an older replay with a newer version of wesnoth.

Nevertheless it's a fact that savegames have grown a lot because of that and we have to think severely if we keep it this way or not.
i said already, more or less, that i don't need/want a replay. the idea from turin seems to be really good for me. the unit data and all the necessary stuff to make a replay compatible with newer versions, should be saved only once, in the moment when wesnoth ask if you want a replay or not. if not, then you will go a lot faster to the next scenario and the saves between the turns are shorter, which is a fix for the problem! and to have the possibility to turn off the autosave feature completly would increase the performace a lot more, which brings back some of the old game fun. the way it is, removes the fun nearly complete! (at least for me)

and btw. thanks to some changes, some older campaigns won't work with newer versions, so we can drop the compatibility for the replays too, imho
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torangan
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Post by torangan »

You seem to miss the obvious part - if you load a save which doesn't contain a replay as well, tell me: Where do you get the data for the replay from when it's time to save it? Don't try the cheap exit of keeping it in memory, Wesnoth may have been restarted in the meantime.
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flava_clown
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Post by flava_clown »

okay that's a good point... but it seems that you missunderstand something. some of the infos in the autosave game are for the compatibility of a replay only, they can be easily stored in an extra file, that's more or less what turin want. the point is that we don't need infos like movement cost, resistence, max hp, mx xp,... and the like in every autosave file. you don't use the autosave for a replay!
btw. an option to turn the autosave feature off, would help alot! like this it's not necessary to talk about the stored informations...
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scott
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Post by scott »

flava_clown wrote: the point is that we don't need infos like movement cost, resistence, max hp, mx xp,... and the like in every autosave file. you don't use the autosave for a replay!
That information has another purpose which I consider far more important. It allows many of the new WML capabilities to function (although in that regard it should be possible to save only differences from the standard unit definitions rather than the whole unit every time).

I place exactly zero value in having replays from different development versions be compatible with each other. It might be nice for players but it doesn't help development to see what happened in an old version.
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Post by flava_clown »

scott wrote: (although in that regard it should be possible to save only differences from the standard unit definitions rather than the whole unit every time).
that's what i mean! and that's the way it was in the past. dunno why you guys changed this.
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