Time Machine for Factorio

[ssilk]

Anybody, who doesn't know, what Time Machine (MacOS) is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28OS_X%29

TL;DR: Time Machine is too strong, this is just a "list of changes" to keep the overview over your saves and enable simple renaming etc. A good replacement would be also "Where are my saves?".



I want to have a list of all changes I made for one world / for all worlds. Not a full backup, just the list, the overview. Not the similar/same comfort, but also the possibility to go back in time and see all the changes somehow.

My vision is, that I can go back in time and see for example every day, what worlds I started and if there are older versions, maybe already deleted or in trashcan or on a backup-device. You might also be able to add comments into that list like "This save shows a bug...".

The implementation could be just a simple list: Whenever Factorio saves or deletes (or just moves).

That idea is not dependend on how the save-file-names are created (world wise). But any ideas that will do such stuff can profit from such a list.

[brunzenstein]

The way TimeMachine works is that it even creates local snapshots when no backup medium is present. So it should be easy for Mac users to go back in time.

[daniel34]

Some user named ssilk would probably ask "what is the gameplay value?".

No, really, what were you trying to do where this suggestion would help you?

My vision is, that I can go back in time and see for example every day, what worlds I started and if there are older versions, maybe already deleted or in trashcan or on a backup-device.

I think if you wanted to do that, then keep your saves and don't delete them. Factorio already allows you to make folders inside the saves folder and to browse them in-game to organize your save files. (see also the replay comment below)

I want to have a list of all changes I made for one world / for all worlds. Not a full backup, just the list, the overview. Not the similar/same comfort, but also the possibility to go back in time and see all the changes somehow.

Can you describe what these changes should be? Are that (1) events like "first biter nest destroyed", "first blue science researched" and "first rocket launched" that have to be defined yet, or (2) Technology research, or maybe (3) user defined events, aka just making another save at that point.

You can also use the replay function to not only replay a save, but also to save the game at a specific point in the replay and then load that game in single- or multiplayer.

Consider the Steam cloud save function: The limit is set to 1GB (IIRC) and my current saves at steam launch already had 500MB without any time machine functionality, making me disable the cloud function because of my slow upload speed.
Not only that, some players with already small hard drive space wouldn't like it if every manual/auto-save would make a new savegame on the disk, as they can grow to be several GB large very fast.

Adding this as an option would make most players not use that option, therefore implementing it (and this is probably different for win/linux/mac) would just be a waste of developer time, given that time machine doesn't only exist on Mac, but also e.g. Windows (Acronis True Image) and I'm sure there also is a solution for Linux out there.
Another easy way would be to make a SVN or OwnCloud service that stores older file revisions, even locally.

[ssilk]

No, really, what were you trying to do where this suggestion would help you?

Well, for now it's to have an overview: When and how long did I play with which world. When did I create a copy of a world to split that world into two (or more) "directions".

That was the basic idea. To put it into the "Time Machine" was a really stupid idea.

I thought a bit now: When I leave away all the unneeded stuff in that suggestion, the remaining idea is, that there is some kind of logfile, where every file-transaction is written into.