Braid Dev Says Auto-Save Warnings Waste Time and Money

[Daystar Clarion]

Oh, you made one mildly successful indy game?

Tell me how you're a genius who will single handedly save the industry from AAA gaming.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

As does his solution. I was questioning wether or not his actually takes less time.

The warnings are there for a reason and are rather useful.

The solution, he says, is to use a save system that won't corrupt files if the console is switched off.

Same as above. You dont actually know that and he does not actually say that. He never once mentions the cost or time required to implement his system. The developer still needs to create and test it so why are we ignoring that time and cost.

Also telling people your game autosaves is actually a good thing to do.

Yeah, and PC games have been doing it for decades just fine without needing a screen that bold-facedly tells you what "auto-save" means. At any rate though, I'm not a developer, nor are you, so neither of us can really say whether his system is necessarily faster/easier/cheaper to implement. Frankly I wouldn't have even thought much of the screen warning us about the auto-save icon. I always just assumed it was something that one developer did, then others started following in suit; I never figured it was an actual requirement for a game to be published on the 360, and I definitely never would have figured it took much effort.

It does not prevent the save from being corrupt. You can still corrupt the save being created and will have to start at the last time it saved. Depending on the frequency of the autosave this could be 10 mins, and hour, or a boss fight you just spent four hours trying to beat. Yea you dont lose your whole save but you can still lose your progress.

And again, the people who are SO worried about losing said progress are the people who aren't going to get their data corrupted, anyway. Honestly tell me: Have you EVER had to pause what you were doing to wait for the game to get done with it's auto-save? Ever? Even once? My money is on "no", because your probably standing still while you shut things down, and if your character isn't moving anywhere, then there's nothing to auto-save. As I already stated, the time it takes to shut down the system, even if you're in a rush, is going to be a slower process than any game auto-saving. About the only thing that's likely to shut the system down during an auto-save is mom walking into the room and shutting it down because she's pissed about something, and at that point I don't think she's gonna bother to check the screen for an auto-save function that she doesn't even know about.

So which is better in that case; full corruption and having to start over from scratch, or just losing some progress since the last auto-save?

Wow you used two whole quotes and neither one of them actually answered any of my points. Congratulations.

Only because your fingers are too far shoved into your ears to hear any kind of answers. You have your own answers, and you'll be damned if you listen to someone else's.

The thing we dont know thats what he actually meant. Sure the whole process could take three days but those three days could easily only be 10 actual man hours.

It's a fairly logical conclusion, though. He probably wrote-up the post from which these articles came from with the intent of it being read by other developers who would just know what's meant. Yeah sure, taken out of context who knows what "3 days" means, but when talking from one businessman to another, it's already known.

 

[Falterfire]

I'm reasonably certain that the Pokemon games use a double-save. I've accidentally corrupted Pokemon saves before by doing what definitely wasn't save editing, and after being told my save was corrupted it generally loads my next most recent save. So there's that at least.

For PC development a double-save system is easy to implement and a fairly effective way to prevent total loss of progress in the event of a catastrophic save failure or poorly done save manipulation. Of course, with PC you can also have save files than are 100kb or less so you basically have free reign to put plenty of backups anyways. (A quick search of my computer reveals that my Mass Effect 3 saves for all three profiles are taking up a whopping 1.7 megabytes between all of them, and that includes about thirty obsessive-compulsive backups.

 

[darkszero]

So much raging about pointless things.

The "auto-save in progress" icon currently exists to warn players to not turn off their consoles while it's saving.
A better system would be to save in the way described by Jonathan and just tell the user "Auto Save completed!".

This way you keep the good (tell the user when an auto-save is realized) and remove the bad (save corruption).

PS: a simple notification ("save complete!") is much easier to implement than a operation-in-progress.

 

[Fappy]

Oh, you made one mildly successful indy game?

Tell me how you're a genius who will single handedly save the industry from AAA gaming.

Him and the Fez dev should get a room!

 

[GenGenners]

How petty and full of crap is this guy?
He's got more bile than Yahtzee.

 

[Shjade]

It's been said that the person with the most to say on a matter knows the least about it

Possible flaw in your logic: Blow is the only one making noise about this as a problem. By your reasoning, this makes him an extremely unreliable source about it.

 

[Yuri Albuquerque]

As does his solution. I was questioning wether or not his actually takes less time.

No, it does not. File validation is an open algorithm (you could use CRC-32, MD5, SHA-1, all of them are free and trivial to implement).

You don't have any idea what you're talking about.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

It's been said that the person with the most to say on a matter knows the least about it

Possible flaw in your logic: Blow is the only one making noise about this as a problem. By your reasoning, this makes him an extremely unreliable source about it.

Except that for every time he mentions something like this, about 50 people come in and throw a fit about it. So who's really saying more on the matter? The difference is that Blow is an actual developer and has actually been in the trenches, so to speak, where most (if not all) people who speak against him don't know the first thing about programming. Thus, those who have the most to say on a matter often know the least about it.

 

[Shjade]

It's been said that the person with the most to say on a matter knows the least about it

Possible flaw in your logic: Blow is the only one making noise about this as a problem. By your reasoning, this makes him an extremely unreliable source about it.

Except that for every time he mentions something like this, about 50 people come in and throw a fit about it. So who's really saying more on the matter? The difference is that Blow is an actual developer and has actually been in the trenches, so to speak, where most (if not all) people who speak against him don't know the first thing about programming. Thus, those who have the most to say on a matter often know the least about it.

I don't think you understand what "most" means.

People who write a paragraph of angry response to widespread press coverage on a topic clearly have much less to say on the matter than the guy who seeks out press coverage to spread his opinions about it.

Your explanation (most to say -> know the least) is not impacted by a person's actual experience, so Blow being a developer is irrelevant to you, or at least it should be if you care about consistency. Similarly, the fact that a group of people all throw a fit about the same thing does not mean any one of them has very much to say. Indeed, I would bet that no individual in your purported 50 out-volumes Blow for discourse on the subject, meaning he still has the most to say both as an individual and, considering the angry 50 are likely just reiterating points others within that group have already said, thereby making their cumulative contribution to the topic considerably less than it may first appear, probably on the whole as well.

tl;dr - When you plan to write off a group of people by saying they don't know what they're talking about, it helps if you sound like you know what you're talking about when you do it.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

It's been said that the person with the most to say on a matter knows the least about it

Possible flaw in your logic: Blow is the only one making noise about this as a problem. By your reasoning, this makes him an extremely unreliable source about it.

Except that for every time he mentions something like this, about 50 people come in and throw a fit about it. So who's really saying more on the matter? The difference is that Blow is an actual developer and has actually been in the trenches, so to speak, where most (if not all) people who speak against him don't know the first thing about programming. Thus, those who have the most to say on a matter often know the least about it.

I don't think you understand what "most" means.

People who write a paragraph of angry response to widespread press coverage on a topic clearly have much less to say on the matter than the guy who seeks out press coverage to spread his opinions about it.

Your explanation (most to say -> know the least) is not impacted by a person's actual experience, so Blow being a developer is irrelevant to you, or at least it should be if you care about consistency. Similarly, the fact that a group of people all throw a fit about the same thing does not mean any one of them has very much to say. Indeed, I would bet that no individual in your purported 50 out-volumes Blow for discourse on the subject, meaning he still has the most to say both as an individual and, considering the angry 50 are likely just reiterating points others within that group have already said, thereby making their cumulative contribution to the topic considerably less than it may first appear, probably on the whole as well.

tl;dr - When you plan to write off a group of people by saying they don't know what they're talking about, it helps if you sound like you know what you're talking about when you do it.

Wow. You're reaching so hard to try and disprove some ages-old phrase that I honestly wonder if you even remember what we're talking about. Also, in response to your tl;dr, when you plan to defend an entire group of people by implying that they know what they're talking about, it helps if they actually DO know what they're talking about and not just blindly raging against the source material.

Seriously, Jonathon Blow could write-up a blog post about how how it's a shame that gaming is seen in such a negative light in society, and people would line-up around the corner to talk about how it's good that everyone hates gaming. Not because they actually prefer that gaming be seen negatively, but because Jonathon Blow dared to have an opinion, so everyone wants to explain how it's wrong (even if it's right).

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Also, for the people saying that the "have two save files" thing would cost developers money; if you bothered to actually read the blog post the article is talking about (instead of just going into a blind rage), you'd know that he says this is something that could (and should) be built into the consoles as just the default saving method; hence the developers wouldn't even have to think about it.

 

[Poster1234]

Ok first off, I don't believe that coding a little flashing save icon can possibly cost so much time and money for it to be of any significance in the budget of an AAA title.
Secondly, while I have always felt that each and everyone should be allowed to express their views on gaming, I feel that Jonathan Blow is getting a little bit too much attention. I mean, he only made, as far as I am aware, one single game, not matter how good it was. In fact, I find it especially excruciating to have to listen to this guy's opinion of how the industry should deal with saves, considering his "magnum opus" only allowed for one, single save at one time. I mean, come on ! If your game is so blasted clever, why do you have to make it such pain for me to show it off to my friends and family (because if Braid is such an "experience", you'll want people to try it from the start, right ?)
I just looked into the game files : ok, granted, there is no separate file for the saves, so it's not just a matter of "why the hell couldn't I choose from different files/folders (I'm looking at you, Bastion, but I still love you). Still, if you can code saves, you can code a way to have several of them.

Now, as to his actual idea on saves : is this guy really going to say the main problem with the corruption of save files is the "save" icon ? Isn't the main problem the fact that many games always overwrite the same file over and over again ? Which makes it possible to put the game in an unwinnable state without any sort of bug (fucking Overlord II) ?
I find this guy just criticized the one part of most console's saving system that isn't broken.
When it comes to how to fix it, I say, look at Skyrim : have a rotation of, say, 3 autosaves. If one gets corrupted, you loose from 10 seconds to 10 minutes of gameplay, no harm done.

 

[JokerboyJordan]

It's been said that the person with the most to say on a matter knows the least about it

You're the one who's said the most by replying to many individuals in this thread.
What does that say?

Captcha: Good for nothing. Sums up my opinions on this.

 

[devotedsniper]

Surely once you've made an auto save system you would just use it for all your games (obviously some changes would need to be made for each (e.g. icons) or at least that's how I've been coding all my uni work making it modular so I can take parts of code and recycle them for example I can take my random number generator and transfer it into any of my c# projects link it up and it will work.

 

[Screamarie]

I don't know if this guy is right or not, I'm not a developer and I've heard some people on both sides say "yes he is" and "no he's not" so I'll just leave that be.

My problem with Blow is that he just seems so high on the horse that I can't really stand him. Maybe your way IS better Blow, but that doesn't mean YOUR better and it certainly doesn't mean Braid is better. Braid, at least to me, is a Mario clone with a face life and a Prince of Persia rewind button. Not saying it's bad, just that I don't think he ever did anything especially innovative or new.

And it's not that I don't think he shouldn't get to state his opinion, but...he's made ONE game. I think you have to make more than ONE game before you pretend you know better than the people who have been at it for many, many years. Sure, young fresh eyes can lead to new innovations, but when you point out a potential flaw you gotta do it with some humility.

 

[Artemicion]

Oh, you made one mildly successful indy game?

Tell me how you're a genius who will single handedly save the industry from AAA gaming.

This, so hard.

I wonder if this guy complains about the color of the sky and his preference of certain blues over other blues.

And how god could have saved development time if he just picked a single shade.

 

[MetalMagpie]

1. I like to know exactly when the game has saved. This is especially important in games that don't offer any sort of manual save (such as Assassin's Creed). When I want to stop playing, I wait until the next time I see the saving icon, then quit once it's done.

See, here's my problem with this point: The people who are worried about their saves to the point where they'd specifically want to be told when it's saving are the people who are going to shut-down their game and system properly, which means it's completely moot to let people know when the game is saving anyway.

It's not like the 360 is ALWAYS saving. Even in the case of a game that keeps saving your checkpoint (like wandering around the Citadel in Mass Effect), if your character has been standing still for 5 seconds (you know, the time it takes to get-up and walk across the room to shut-off the system in the most abrupt manner possible, to say nothing of holding the X-button down to selected "Shut Down" in the menu), then your game is long-since done saving, and the icon has long-since vanished. It's to the point where I would argue that even the people who are most likely to accidentally corrupt their saves by just randomly shutting down the system would be hard-pressed to make it line-up perfectly with the few seconds it takes to auto-save.

I was thinking mostly of games that use defined auto-save points and where there isn't an option to save manually. Assassin's Creed only saves on particular events (covering most of the things that counts as "achievements"), and there isn't a manual save. So you can go to all the trouble of travelling from one city to another (sneaking past/fighting off guards), quit without reaching a save point, and have to do the whole journey again when you next sit down to play. So whenever I wanted to finish playing Assassin's Creed, I waited until the next time I saw the save symbol, then switched off once it was finished.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge has a similar system. It's a linear game and it saves at pre-specified points (only identifiable by the fact that the save icon appears). There's no option to save manually, so you can end up having to repeat sections of gameplay if you quit at an arbitrary point. (Something that's happened to me more than once when I've needed to rush out!)

Or possibly these games could solve the problem by just including a manual save!

 

[Epona]

So the little spinning icon that appears at the top of the screen while auto saving (FF 13-2) is too much trouble?

 

[frizzlebyte]

On the subject of Mr Blow however, and I mean this in a neutral manner as much as possible, is he actually doing any new games that we know of? I guess I don't understand why people focus on his opinions so much, they rarely tend to be particularly profound or insightful.

Yeah, he's doing one called "The Witness". It's a little like Myst, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, I think one of the reasons that people listen to his opinions is that he tends to look at games from an artist's perspective, and seems to want to elevate games to a higher form, utilizing their specific strengths as a medium.

I also tend to think there's a bit of the "man of the week" thing going on. Kind of like Christopher Nolan and J.J. Abrams, if I had to have a reference.