slaen
patreon
Female Imp texturing - and save game woes
🕑 Added 2022-06-14 21:58:13 +0000 UTCThe outfit doesn't have a proper low poly model yet and is just there to get a sense of the color balancing and stuff. But I was able to get some basic colors down on the female imps. There's still a bunch of polish to do and her overall color scheme might change a bit but she's getting there.
Other than that I've continued looking into the save game issues with sub-levels inside of Unreal. The way that I have things set up is that things like the interiors of buildings or dungeons are all sub-levels. They are loaded and unloaded anytime the player uses a door. Which means that anything the player does while inside gets erased as soon as they leave and then go back in. So if the player trashes the tavern and steals every item in sight, then walks out the door, and then walks back in, everything will be back in place but the player will still have all the stolen objects in their inventory.
My initial idea was to save the state of all of the dynamic actors out to a text file. The first time the player enters the building it creates a text file, then when they exit the building that text file records the state of every dynamic actor, then when the re-enter the building it would load the actors in their correct state. My thinking was that this would be the cheapest way of doing things so that the entire world state and all of the actors wouldn't need to be loaded at once. They could just be recorded and forgotten about until the player entered that specific location again.
Ok, so how do you do that? One video I stumbled across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrdEha-Ogc8
Then I starting wondering if the save system I'm using has something already implemented that supports this; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdR2xaNhn9Y
Which it thankfully does.
Now the next issue comes up. What if the player saves before entering a building, goes into the building messes stuff up, exits the building - which will create a save state for that building, but then loads the save from before entering the building? The two saves are separate files and have separate information. But the one of the building interior, from the point of view of the save that was just loaded, hasn't happened yet. So the player effectively loads their save, travels back in time, but then enters the building and the building is still messed up even though in this version of the world they haven't entered the building yet.
I actually made a bunch of flow charts trying to figure out ways around this issue. Like doing versioning numbers, time stamps to compare world states, using multiple saves for each interior, all sorts of stuff.
So far the "best" solution I've come up with is an auto-save feature. So every time the player exits a building it will save the state of that building and then create a player state save that happens immediately after. That way you get to avoid jumping around in time.
Thanks for getting this far through me talking about save system stuff :) and now for a question:
How do people feel about an auto-save feature? I'm thinking there would be like 3 player profiles and then each profile would have one save. The biggest downside, of course, is that the player doesn't haven't multiple saves to jump between if they so choose. And depending on how you look at it - the player's choices would really be locked in. If the player wanted to run a quest but wanted to see multiple different outcomes they would need to do multiple play throughs rather than relying on saving and loading before that quest.
Comments
slaen
Lol, yeah these imps are going to be awesome once they've got some animations on them. The save thing I can see being a pain if someone wants to save just before their favorite encounters or before major choices. So then it's almost like a gallery system at that point. Which at some point I need to look into making a gallery system... hmm.
Buzzbomber
Still love this imp beyond all reason. Don't mind autosave btw, I can't really find any reason to argue against it.
