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**Gary Thomas** · January 7, 2002, 15:38

My main comment is that I would promote 7 to position 1. My reason is that this area is progressing, and the more work that is done before the reorganization, the more work that will need refactoring. Once it is done, adding new features in any of the areas becomes quite easy.

Cheers

**axi** · January 7, 2002, 17:29

Agree with Gary. Also promote #15 somewhere before demo 7.

IMHO Saves=everything

**Mark_Everson** · January 7, 2002, 20:58

Hi All:

Gary, I did agree that 7 could go first with you, just forgot to bump it up. And the list was meant to be mostly mine anyway

Axi, there is already a guy named Chris Maeda working on the saves. I don't think he's shown up on the forum yet... So there is hope for your demands!

**Gary Thomas** · January 8, 2002, 23:06

I feel quite strongly the saves should be incremental. That is, you don't save the game, just the changes since the last save. This will make the size of the saved files enormously smaller.

I also believe that it will be possible to save the entire progress of the game this way, allowing restarting at any point, or animated replays, to see just what did happen.

Cheers

**LDiCesare** · January 9, 2002, 04:20

I feel quite strongly the saves should be incremental. That is, you don't save the game, just the changes since the last save. This will make the size of the saved files enormously smaller.

Although I tend to agree since it makes save/load faster, I doubt on the file size issue. Do you mean you will have several linked files (in which case the latter files will indeed be small)? If you have a single file, it will usually get bigger after 2 incremental saves than it would have been had it been rewritten entirely.

**Gary Thomas** · January 9, 2002, 16:15

What I had in mind was a single zip file (per game) containing a zipped up file for the start, and one for each successive turn.

What I do want to avoid is having to save a possibly huge, and substantially identical, map for every save. If a map is Earth sized, it will have something like 120x300 squares (depending on the projection accepted - remember my comments on using real coordinates). Each map square has around 1000 bytes of information, say. This gives 36 Mb per map. 1000 turns gives...

Cheers

**Gary Thomas** · January 9, 2002, 16:18

I really like the Civ option, at the end of the game, of replaying the spread of empires. I usually replay it many times. The incremental method allows very detailed replays.

One thing missing from Civ is that when you meet a new civilization you have no idea of its history. This is unrealistic since that is pretty much the first thing you would find out. I would envisage that (at a price) you could replay another civilization's history, to get some idead of its behaviour.

Cheers

**axi** · January 9, 2002, 17:05

Gary, if we used incremental saves, then swapping savegames would be impossible. We should do it like every other game out there. Plus making it possible to isolate the elements of the savegame from the file (the map, the population, the infrastructure, the civs).

As for the map, it will be as big as our computers will let it be. We may end up with a game unplayabe in maps with more than 1000 tiles - so what?

**Mark_Everson** · January 9, 2002, 20:18

I also think we should have standard save files. But I do really like the replay option. I think it would be worthwhile to have a dedicated file, or sequence of files to enable replay as Gary suggests. Since for replay many of the very small details aren't important, those files could be relatively small compared to a save file.

**Gary Thomas** · January 11, 2002, 20:00

Gary, if we used incremental saves, then swapping savegames would be impossible.

I cannot see why this follows at all. What is the problem?

I also think we should have standard save files. But I do really like the replay option. I think it would be worthwhile to have a dedicated file, or sequence of files to enable replay as Gary suggests. Since for replay many of the very small details aren't important, those files could be relatively small compared to a save file.

I think that the extra complexity of having two systems will probably be counter-productive. The only possible reason is to save disk space, and I really don't see this as being a problem.
There is another possiblity which I like the idea of - that is to load the game at some point, and choose another civilization. So yuou can play the game as Scipio or as Hannibal, to see how well you do. Incremental saves allow this in an easy manner.

Cheers

**Mark_Everson** · January 12, 2002, 20:22

I think Axi's point was that if there are 452 sequential files involved in a save, and you miss on, you're dead. whereas if there is one file its easy not to screw up.

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
There is another possiblity which I like the idea of - that is to load the game at some point, and choose another civilization. So yuou can play the game as Scipio or as Hannibal, to see how well you do. Incremental saves allow this in an easy manner.

Periodic saves of the whole game also allow this.

I just think that So Much is going to change over even a few turns that you will end up saving virtually the entire game every time anyway. The unchanging parts are: The map outlines, and numbers of sites per map square will change infrequently. Just about everyting else will change over relatively small numbers of turns. Everything in the economy changes gradually, Same for much of the Social model. These are the largest memory-users in the game.

At any rate, we need something to save the Whole game for the first turn. I don't think incremental saves are going to be Needed, even if we go that way, for Many demos into the future. So I suggest we table the topic until we can see what fraction of the data change over a few turns, and we can then gauge the worthiness of incremental saves.

Cya,

Mark

**Gary Thomas** · January 12, 2002, 20:47

I think Axi's point was that if there are 452 sequential files involved in a save, and you miss on, you're dead. whereas if there is one file its easy not to screw up.

There will be only one zip file per game. It will contain the original scenario in an internal file. Each incremental save will be another internal file. So to send the game to someone else you send just the zip file.

Actually this system uses less files than other systems, one per game rather than one per save.

Cheers

**Mark_Everson** · January 12, 2002, 21:02

Hey Gary:

Sorry, you had said that way at the beginning of the discussion and I missed it.

**LDiCesare** · January 13, 2002, 05:52

I want to echo Axi's question about swapping files. If you somehow delete the save file, will you be able to save it and have the same functionality? (save as).
You will miss the replay, since we won't keep all the history in-memory. Now, you don't have to delete files, but you can swap them, make save as, copy and move them, and eventually screw up the final replay.

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Planning for Demos 7 & 8

Planning for Demos 7 & 8

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