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Andrea Rovenski

Disable Saving/ Loading?

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I am going to assume you are using zdoom and it is forcing autosave. You can disable autosaves with disableautosave 2.

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=23543
I requested disabling autoloads 2 years ago but its apparently not in there.

The only way to not be forced to autoload a savegame is to never use saves to begin with or to juggle 2 savegames.

When juggling I used one savegame to actually save the game and another to save the game at the start of a map. So if I died on map, zdoom would reload last save, then you can load up save game from map start.

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No, the lack of saving ruins everything and gets you a spot on my hitlist along with every other game developer who sporadically disabled saving at a whim.

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Yeah but when I play and die in a level I have to warp back to the level to have the classic "death penalty". Maybe if it were a user setting that only apply to Doom and Boom compat settings but was forced for ZDoom/Hub levels.

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Manhunt21 said:

Damn. I was making a survival area and Saving just ruins the whole thing!

Hope you're happy with your mod being unceremoniously deleted by the people who need to quit in the middle and come back later.

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Just encourage the players to not save their game mid-level, in the text file. They might abide by it for the sake of "honor" or "staying true to the author's intent" or whatever.

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I'll be as clear as I can:

As far as it concerns ZDoom, this 'feature' is one of the most definite 'no's as long as I am working on it. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that it'll ever be implemented.

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Disabling saves altogether is like disabling cheats. It's stupid and pointless, because the people who would have cheated or saved should not matter to a mapper that's aiming for people who play in a legit manner, and all the people who needed to cheat or save would just quit anyway. Disabling autoload should be an option, though, or otherwise you can't even use the engine to play like the original game in that respect.

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Being able to save and reload to take a break is fine but death is meaningless if you can save before every fight and always immediately reload to a point just before the beginning of the battles that kill you. Having got into Crawl over the past couple of years I've wondered what playing Doom with roguelike-style permanent death would be like.

On the other hand, replaying the start of a hard map over and over again is repetitive and ultimately tedious and frustrating. At least in a roguelike, when you die, you get a whole new randomly-generated dungeon to explore...

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RjY said:

I've wondered what playing Doom with roguelike-style permanent death would be like.

It'd be a lot like not saving, plus restarting the game every time you die. This is how I usually play anyway.

I actually started working on a source-port based on PrBoom that enforced this style of gameplay, generated random maps using a tweaked version of OBLIGE, and incorporated some elements from the Doom roguelike, but I never had time to finish it. I don't imagine that there'd be much of an audience for it anyway.

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RjY said:

...but death is meaningless if you can save before every fight and always immediately reload to a point just before the beginning of the battles that kill you.

I disagree. Death is not meaningless if you can do that. Having the facility to do it makes no difference, it's actually doing it that does.

And that, IMO, the point. People who want to keep death as "meaningful" as possible can just show a little willpower and opt not to save. If they die, everything is lost. I know that I sometimes play like that but people who don't want to don't have to. Everyone should be happy.

I have never understood the mentality of people who need to be forced not to save by the game not having a save option. If they don't want to save, why don't they simply not save? What I have had though, is plenty of frustration in games where I would have liked to have saved but wasn't able to. Almost always, such a game will piss me off to the point that I rage-quit and can't be bothered going back. The only "meaning" such a system imparts for me is that it means the game is less enjoyable than I would like - possibly to the point of ending up disliking the game.

Even more (@OP), I really don't understand why people, particularly people in an amateur gaming hobby where almost all the players could circumvent the system anyway, want to try and force their gameplay preferences on to someone else. Tell us how you think the mod should be played and leave it up to us to decide whether we are going to follow your advice or not. Either way, it really shouldn't make any difference to you. Why do you care what someone, possibly thousands of miles away, does on their computer?

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RjY said:

Having got into Crawl over the past couple of years I've wondered what playing Doom with roguelike-style permanent death would be like.


After playing the DOOM Roguelike for about an hour, then getting offed by an Imp that accidentally threw a fireball into a nearby exploding barrel, I can say that it would be absolutely terrible. If anything, I'd probably actually really like DOOM RL if you could just save your freaking game. What's so bad about that, anyway? Have an "I Am A Wimp" mode for people who don't feel like bolstering their e-cred and just want to play the game without having to worry about losing all of their progress from one wrong move.

Anyway, as for me, I used to save all the time, but eventually forced myself to only save at the start of each map, which ultimately forced me to play better and increased my skill. I only do mid-level saves if a level is shaping up to be extremely long (something like WARPZONE.WAD, which is a single level that can take over two-and-a-half hours to beat), it's a hub world with no clearly defined start and end, or if I'm reviewing a WAD and just need to see the whole thing in a timely manner without worrying about having to start over.

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Why not having the disable savegames only for some particular difficult level?

Like:

I'm too young to die (with savegames)
Hey, not too rough (with savegames)
Hurt me plenty (with savegames)
Ultra-Violence (with savegames)
Nightmare! (with savegames)
No return (without savegames)

?

Lorenzo

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Megamur said:

[...] having to worry about losing all of their progress from one wrong move.


That's a major defining element of a roguelike, right there. You have to play tactically, or suffer the consequences. If you don't enjoy doing so, you're probably not in the genre's target audience. Besides, the Doom roguelike already has ITYTD skill, where you can RIP AND TEAR through everything with little risk or effort.

Anyway, on topic: having a difficulty setting that disables saving would be largely pointless, because the players who are willing to play on that setting would be willing to just refrain from saving anyway.

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However it is not still clear if Manhunt21 wants not to use savegames while playing any doom wad or if he wants to create a level where savegame is not possible, and for example there are checkpoint and similar...

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Manhunt21 said:

Well, yes, I'm using GZDoom. But, I actually want to get rid of this feature all together for this mod. No saving/ loading at all, in any way.


It looks like he's making a mod and he wants to remove the ability for the player to save their game while playing it. As said above, this is probably not a good idea. If he really wants to go through with it though, he's free to make his own port based on GZDoom and remove whatever game functions he sees fit.

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Mithran Denizen said:

That's a major defining element of a roguelike, right there. You have to play tactically, or suffer the consequences.


There ain't nothin' tactical about getting blown to pieces because an Imp missed its target. It's just random and annoying, and sucks the fun out of what was shaping up to be an otherwise interesting gameplay experience.

To each their own, of course, but I wish RL designers would "get over themselves" a bit and actually make something accessible.

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RjY said:
On the other hand, replaying the start of a hard map over and over again is repetitive and ultimately tedious and frustrating. At least in a roguelike, when you die, you get a whole new randomly-generated dungeon to explore...

Well, the very first attempt, until you reach the end or die, is like a rogue-like, especially if you value surviving. A rouge-like simply doesn't let you continue and forces you to play new levels instead after that death. You can do that in DOOM by leaving the level set you just attempted and getting another to play if you die. If idgames runs out doing that, you can always use Oblige!

And nothing stops you from playing all the discarded levels with retries later anyway. You could simply make a list of levels completed in "rogue-like" fashion and also complete the failed ons the "normal" way, or even keep demos as a record, of course.

In my first plays I tend to play in episodes and relatively carefully for survival purposes, and without saves, so essentially play is rather "rouge-like" up to my first death or if I survive all the way.

A true rogue-like experience from the beginning would not have made sense in DOOM by design unless it were to have been created with a random level generator...

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Why not just making saving only activate when you type a cheat?

You can still save if you want, but it's clearly shown that it's not the way the level is intended to be played.

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As Processingcontrol said, it would be nice to have the ability to disable saving, but allow the user to override it. Therefore, both parties would be pleased. Those that wish to save anyway can (but will know that they have forfeited proper playing of the mod), and the mod author would be able to have saving initially disabled.

Something like if you try to save, it says you can't. Then if you want to save it anyway, you just turn the override on, but know that you're playing improperly.

One actually decent use of this would be to have save points in the level, like Metroid, or Marathon. Just letting the player save whenever breaks the gameplay design of only allowing saving at certain points.

It could be comparable to not being allowed to use cheats in Nighmare mode, but if you want to anyway, you just override it. (again, forfeiting proper playing, but still being allowed to do what you want)

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Again, if you include an override anyway, why bother disabling the save function at all? If the player is so bent on playing the map "properly," they can just use their self-control to keep them from saving.

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Or you could make a similar point via a little dehacked change, such as this:

Patch File for DeHackEd v3.0

# Note: Use the pound sign ('#') to start comment lines.

Doom version = 19
Patch format = 6


Text 11 11
game saved.omg!! u=fag

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Megamur said:

Again, if you include an override anyway, why bother disabling the save function at all?

So it would be completely clear that saving is at the same status as cheating in the level.

If the player is so bent on playing the map "properly," they can just use their self-control to keep them from saving.

That's just like saying that you shouldn't die when you reach 0% health because if that happens the player can just use their self-control to restart the level.

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Processingcontrol said:

So it would be completely clear that saving is at the same status as cheating in the level.



I can't speak for everyone, but 'cheating' per se holds very little meaning for me; I tend to play with ZDoom, and I have literally every single non-gameplay key on my keyboard bound to some CCMD or another. If I die when I don't want to, I push 'P' and get right back up. If I'm irritated by a map in a megawad, I push 'PgUp' and advance to the next one. If I want to summon 5 friendly Arch-Viles, I hit 'J'.

Whether the level's author intended for me to do this is irrelevant, and I don't particularly like the idea of being coerced into a certain mode of play. I also rarely find long periods of consecutive time to play in the first place, so saving the game is very important in my case.

That's just like saying that you shouldn't die when you reach 0% health because if that happens the player can just use their self-control to restart the level.


That's a bit of a strawman there. The 'death' element is intrinsic to Doom's gameplay, while removing useful functions that are supposed to be under the user's control isn't. (Plus, with ZDoom at least, I can revive at the push of a single key, so I often do disregard death when it would be less fun to restart the map.)

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