Make save game overwrites less dangerous

[Linosaurus]

Suggestion for exact specification (just restating the thread).

Saves that you might not want to overwrite:

• Autosaves.
• Saves with a different map exchange string.
• Saves with a longer playtime.
• (ideally: saves with different 'map created time' or some other unique value)

When you open the save dialogue, default to nothing instead of these.
When you attempt to manually overwrite these, ask for confirmation. Hopefully rare enough to not bother anyone.

I have absolutely no idea how saves work in multiplayer.

[ssilk]

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=327 World Names (Configurable additional filename chars and Versioning)

For me this is a question of how to handle "versions of a world". And it must be seen together with the autosave.

[BenSeidel]

If Factorio treats save games as documents and just follows the document saving systems of just about all document editors then there is no issue.
Implement a "save" and "save as..." and it's much more intuitive (because that is what we are used to).

[mp0011]

There's also a funny thing, when I load game from autosave file - when I want to save and exit game (too) quickly, game automatically suggest to save over autosave file. Then, when I later load another game save, game does autosave, deleting previous game.
Autosave files should be in separate subdirectory, without possibility to overwrite it by user.

[subzeros]

Yes thats absolutely true..
Its very annoying if you accidentally overwrite a Factory

[Ripshaft]

1. New games should clear the previous/default save game name variable, forcing the player to enter a new name for their new map or choosing another from the list.
2. Save game overwrite prompt might also come in handy. The game already prompts to save upon quitting, it should also prompt for overwriting. If we don't want to bombard the user with prompts there, perhaps make it so that overwriting is only prompted if the player attempts to overwrite a *different* save than the previous one, but care must be taken to fix #1 first, otherwise the code will just overwrite other prior maps without prompting.

1 seems a well justified change to pursue, and one that I think should be a game design standard like so many others that we've accrued over the years.

2 though is more neutral. It may or may not contribute positively to the experience, kind of hard to get an idea without trying it.


So violent agreement with 1, indifferent to 2.

[YokoZar]

One year later, this is still a thing.

Kovarex's UI post hit Hacker News, given the amount of thought being put into the game's interface going on this seems like a pretty huge omission.

[MicFac]

One year later, this is still a thing.

And another year later, it's still flawed.

Apparently now (I'm currently on 0.17.74) instead of defaulting the save name to the last saved file, it defaults to the last loaded file. However, overwriting another file than the one you loaded still doesn't give a prompt. That's an absolute necessity in my opinion.

Overwriting my save game has always been a fear of me and yesterday it happened to me for the first time. Sometimes I play in a vanilla world, sometimes in a modded one and they are both in the same factorio folder. When I wanted to save the modded world, I think accidentally clicked on the name of the vanilla world and my mouse (which seems to be a bit broken) registered a double click, overwriting the wrong save. This could have easily happened through an accidental double click instead of a hardware issue. Luckily I do frequent backups so I only lost a couple hours of progress instead of over 300.

[BlueTemplar]

If you start a new word document, the first attempted save of that document does not default to the name of the previous document you had open. Folks would lynch Microsoft if that was the behavior

Old post, but, heh, with today's Microsoft...

Surprise ! We've upgraded your work PC to Windows 10 and now your legacy small-business app might or might not work anymore ! But hey, you should be able to roll it back ! Probably. Also, you probably didn't lose all your data in the process. So, do you feel grateful ?

----

What?

I lost a 100-hour Marathon save game by overwriting it with a save of a test world without realizing it.

How many 100-hours would it take to implement this ?
(Also, that's why one should keep multiple backups !!)

[ssilk]

Hm.
What we really need here is a time-machine-like backup.
For anybody who doesn’t know that: Apple internal backup tool works so, that it backups for like every hour or so. Some times a day. (They do that by only saving the changes, but that doesn’t matter here).
So after some days (depends on space on the disk), the hourly backups are reduced to daily backups.
After more time the daily backups are compressed to weekly backups, to monthly backups etc.

So for Factorio: by default it saves every 3 minutes (?), after 5 saves it could reduce to every 15 minutes, 2 hours, a day, a week etc.

[Koub]

No what we need is a KSP-like save system : one game = one folder, and within the folder, you may have as many saves as you like.

[planetmaker]

I'd like to support a change in this direction. One savegame (exchange string) should not - by default - overwrite the savegames of another.

[coppercoil]

I'd like to support a change in this direction. One savegame (exchange string) should not - by default - overwrite the savegames of another.

It looks like simple and effective solution.
I think such override could be possible with an additional warning window "are you really really really sure". And please force some minimum showing time for this warning window because my keyboard sometimes give double <enter> keystrokes...

Another simple solution: every time any file is overriden, rename an old file as rescue_me.zip. This will allow to restore the old file in the case of accident.

[malventano]

This is literally down to 'if new game then use a default (e.g. blank) save name. do not default the save name to the most previous save'. I'm not sure how this has been a problem (and seemingly ignored) for so long now...

[ssilk]

No what we need is a KSP-like save system : one game = one folder, and within the folder, you may have as many saves as you like.

But ... what is a "game" for Factorio? I think you mean the moment, when you create a new map?
Or is it the moment, when you start a new tutorial?
What is it, if you split, like when you load an older map of that game and replay that?

And so on, very much questions.

That was the reason, why I suggest timemachine-backup-like-save-game, because what's relevant for that is only the time, when you save. And you can already create directories (more or less comfortable)...

[BlueTemplar]

In first approximation, one can assume no forking ?

[ssilk]

But... if I cannot fork from my savegames, it makes no sense to store numbers of savegames, cause I need only the last save.

Hm. I'm not against a simple soltion here (anything is better than now), but I just want to point out, that there are more logical solutions here.

[Koub]

Forking would be by renaming within the same map save.
But it would be impossible to overwrite one game with another game
... Like in KSP.

[coppercoil]

Forking would be by renaming within the same map save.
But it would be impossible to overwrite one game with another game

Some important forked save within the same map can be overwritten by accident too.

[Cribbit]

Pretty sure this will just get moved to "frequently requested" but I don't see anything similar? Probably just not good at search.

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... your_save/

Clearly it's already possible in the UI for loading, just not for creating saves.

Alternatively / additionally, having a single "save" that is actually a stack of saves, so that even if you save over it you can revert to an earlier version. Since my saves "folder" would just be named 1-N anyways.