Improved autosaving system.

[Dumbgenius]

A very simple suggestion: append the world seed onto the autosave files. This would mean that if I have two worlds, World A and World B, and I play in World A for a bit, then the autosaves would be _autosave1_53894, _autosave2_53894. and _autosave3_53894 (assuming the seed was 53894). Then if I played on World B for a bit, then the World B autosaves would not overwrite the World A autosaves, as they would have a different world seed, say 46578. The World B autosaves would look like _autosave1_46578, _autosave2_46578 and _autosave3_46578.

Alternatively, you could name each world on creation, and then prepend that to to the autosave name.

I suggest this because I have just lost several hours of gameplay due to the autosaves being lost.



EDIT: I have just thought of another, related, suggestion: make _autosave1 always the most recent, and move the previous _autosave1 to _autosave2, and the previous _autosave2 to _autosave3. _autosave3 is deleted.

My (probably) final suggestion is that you should be able to make worlds save in custom folders, rather that just the default all the time.

[Projekt_13]

Worldname makes more sense, so can you play two times AT the Same seed and can try difrent ways.

[Dumbgenius]

Worldname makes more sense, so can you play two times AT the Same seed and can try difrent ways.

It would certainly be more user-friendly, but it might be harder to code into the game (new UI elements etc.)

[ssilk]

I think the concept of world names is very useful for much more stuff like this.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=7035 Save game names
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=7050 World Names - New worlds have a (default) name
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... %2A#p11245 This was discussed, when the map exchange string was introduced.
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ld+name%2A Would be useful, for many stupid things
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=3344 Minecraft-like World Screen
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=327 Configurable additional filename character whitelist

[Fensterbank]

Hello,

EDIT: I have just thought of another, related, suggestion: make _autosave1 always the most recent, and move the previous _autosave1 to _autosave2, and the previous _autosave2 to _autosave3. _autosave3 is deleted.

I just want to show my support for this idea, I had the same idea today!

At the moment, the naming of the autosaves follows a naming rotation.
First ever made autosave is called _autosave1.zip, then the following will have increased numbers until the maximum autosave count is reached and the autosave iterator is set to 1.

This results in the problem, that you can never know without seeing the dates, which has been the recently created autosave. This feels a bit random, based on the current state of the autosave iterator.

Example:

factorio-saves.png (109.8 KiB) Viewed 4427 times

Like Dumbgenius sayd I think it would be better to save the latest autosave always as _autosave1 and rename the other, then you always know which is the latest and which one is the oldest save.

Reason for me:
I have a 24/7 running game on my cloud server. If I stop the server instance and restart it again, I have to copy the latest autosave to a new static file name which I use as parameter for the start command.
This must be done because the original save game is not overwritten (like in Minecraft)
Cause of the current autosave system, I have to use some shell commands to search the latest save game which I want to continue.

Have a nice day!

[ssilk]

That idea is good, but the change is not transparent, cause: What if you play two worlds; one day world1, the next world2? What is the "latest" save for world2 then? And does that mean, that all saves of world1 are deleted then?

[Fensterbank]

Thats right. Considering multiple worlds, we should definiteley make the autosave world specific.
In my screenshot, the latest autosave should be named MyWorld_autosave1.zip.
Then we have multiple autosaves (based on the setting) for each world.

In fact I also like the idea of just overwriting the current world (without creating autosave files), especially in headless server mode. Than it would be like minecraft and you can always stop and start your server with the same command for the same world.
But maybe this would be a huge change in comparition to the current behavior and the user loses the possibility to go back to an older autosave.

[starholme]

Thats right. Considering multiple worlds, we should definiteley make the autosave world specific.
In my screenshot, the latest autosave should be named MyWorld_autosave1.zip.
Then we have multiple autosaves (based on the setting) for each world.

In fact I also like the idea of just overwriting the current world (without creating autosave files), especially in headless server mode. Than it would be like minecraft and you can always stop and start your server with the same command for the same world.
But maybe this would be a huge change in comparition to the current behavior and the user loses the possibility to go back to an older autosave.

I'm reasonably sure that you can do this with the headless server already. Just use the command line arguments to say 'only one autosave slot', and load autosave 1.

[slippycheeze]

Considering multiple worlds, we should definiteley make the autosave world specific.

Since this is the closest topic to what I came to ask: I'd like to second this. My immediate problem is that I have the occasional crash (or regrettable life choice) and load from an _autosave file.

Then I spend, like, five hours saving under the name "_autosave2" because i forgot to save it back to the original name the first time. Even just `_autosave2_autosave3` would be an improvement. -_-


Ideally, though, I'd love the game to strip the autosave suffix smartly, so loading "foo_autosave" would save as "foo" by default, but I recognise that is problematic for ... many cases, compared to just "autosave based on the current name of the game world"