Version 0.5.1

[wrtlprnft]

Developing such system on your own requires a few things:
1. Adding capability to the game to download or upload some files from some server - not verry hard
2. Developing seververvide web service whic would be used for sending and retrieving data from game client - verry hard as it needs to be bug free.
3. You need to have high performance server which would be capable of running your web service. Also the server itself shouldn't have any bandwich limitation (the amount of data that can be transfered in certain time). Costs for having such server are quite large.
In short implementing this on your own would require even more work than implementing multiplayer capability.

I didn't say it was no work at all. In fact your list proves to me that implementing it would be mostly boring (at least to me, and I suspect to the game developers as well, as it doesn't concern the game) work.

I do think that a minimal version of this feature could be implemented with relative ease. After all, automated in-game sharing of save files shouldn't eat more bandwidth than manual sharing on these forums. Given that the update feature (and the downloads of game files) already use amazon's stuff, it would be an obvious choice. Of course, this would eat actual money instead of “just” developer time.

However, if the PA version uses steam (I didn't know that), it would probably make sense to wait until factorio is on steam.

[MF-]

Storing saves as zips by default will be done soon.

Nice. Will that also allow grouping saves into directories?

I wonder about the performance implications.
Will there be any way of snapshotting the game state, so the game can continue while the ZIP runs?

[Dakkanor]

Galactic civilizations or Fallen Enchantress

what about fallout? what about assasins creed? witcher?

many actually good games are SP, this is not "issue", much more better to invest time into gameplay improvements

i think the point of those games are the play style, fallout assasins creed and the witcher are all more action based games, than factorio, having the major point of the game being about building and developing is what makes comparisons to GalCiv or FE or even Civ, while Fo3 Fo:NV AC1,2,3 don't really serve well because they don't overlap with factorio as well.


next point, MP would be cool, however far from something that i would consider necessary for the game

[SilverWarior]

I wonder about the performance implications.
Will there be any way of snapshotting the game state, so the game can continue while the ZIP runs?

You can always save savegame into memory first, and only then write it into the file or even comress it before writing in file. And since you are actuall working on copy of relavent data it means that you can continue your gameplay during this time.
But using this sytem requires the implementation of safety mechanizem which is able to predict wheter the game can duplicate all the relevant data (enough memory available) if not it should use direct to disk writing way of saving the savegame instead.

[Darenkel]

I'm not using any mods. The game throws a "Can't Find" error on the 'levels.dat' file that is in '...\roaming\wow\' (also, the start of the line reads 'C:/users\...')

I get the error just after I click the 'Load Game' button. This has nothing to do with the saves themselves (they work on the other builds).

However, the content of the save might matter.
There might be, say, an error in a conversion script.
Please attach it.

Looks like I fixed the issue... had to delete the old saves (some from as far back as 0.3) which seems to have taken care of the problem. Looks like an old save format may have been incompatible... ah well. After comparing the save files, there is definitely a difference in how they are handled in the latest build... which was probably covered at some point that I'm being a bit ignorant about atm...

[slpwnd]

Looks like I fixed the issue... had to delete the old saves (some from as far back as 0.3) which seems to have taken care of the problem. Looks like an old save may have been incompatible... ah well.

Strange, but happy to hear your problem is fixed. Next time please put these kind of things into the bug reports section so it is available for other people as well.

You can always save savegame into memory first, and only then write it into the file or even comress it before writing in file. And since you are actuall working on copy of relavent data it means that you can continue your gameplay during this time.
But using this sytem requires the implementation of safety mechanizem which is able to predict wheter the game can duplicate all the relevant data (enough memory available) if not it should use direct to disk writing way of saving the savegame instead.

Actually we have experimented with parallel (auto)saving already. Pretty much what you say. The state is writtein into the memory and then dumped to the disk asynchronously. It worked however it was not a big speedup. There are a few technical problems in there (i.e. the preview picture has to be generated in the main thread because of how the allegro library works). However we might revisit this once the saving starts to get slower (like when saving into the zipfile directly).

[Darenkel]

It looked like you guys used to have the saves dump to a single file until recently. I think that is why the level.dat loading issue cropped up in the first place. On a lighter note, I like how the saves are handled now, much easier to tell what all is in a save.

[wrtlprnft]

Also note that while writing a .zip, you get to choose how much effort you put into compressing your data. Given the speed of current CPUs, compressing the data a little might actually speed things up because less data needs to be written to disk.

Of course, that's unless you have fancy SSDs or huge write caches, but in these cases it's probably fast enough already.

[RawCode]

there is completely no need to save entire world, state of machines, amount of resources, contents of chests and many other things, only data that must be stored:
X\Y + machine ID + metadata.

all this data can be embedded into screenshot in form of pixels with special color or directly embedded data, many image formats allow to embedded additional metadata.

in this case, posting screenshot of your factory == sharing your factory.

this is best possible way to share, since it can use *your* favorite social networks to share stuff and dont depend on central server and factory can be previewed without game.

[MF-]

But if the social network will likely decide that the image is preposterously big and that the fine invisible information should be stripped...
Or they might flag you for using steganography and.. well..

[RawCode]

in most cases image hosters allow to keep image intact, steganography detection a bit hard, it unlikely that someone will instantly ban user for hosting images with metadata.