Found out the hard way to pause the game before minimizing...

[MH DOOM]

I guess I was spoiled or used to how most games auto pause when they go out of focus. Hell, I think State of Decay auto pauses when I open the Steam Overlay

But I get pulled away from my PC for a half hour and--even though I'm not far--I lost Maya, and a ton of morale and other things.

I'm not willing to let there be a loss because of stupidity like that, but I don't think I'm very much I'm to starting over right now.

Maybe if Breakdown gets a sale soon, I'll pick it up and try it out. This was a fun romp while it lasted, though =(

[DedZedNub]

Well, luckily it is easy to prevent such loss, default hit escape key until the menu comes up and the game is paused. The game is constantly real-time when you are in it, whether looking at map screen, choosing base options, choosing skills on character, you name it.

Which is one reason you really need back-up saves and/or some other method of getting around bug issues and the offline/simulated changes ("aka persistence" -- wrong name actually -- it's actually anti-persistent to the save) implemented to make your real-life away time allow game simulation to continue without player input or control (do we call that solo-play? multi-player? Cyberdyne? is that even a game when you aren't playing it ? anyway)

But, here is a bit of history for you, so that perhaps in future you will more consistently pause the game, and some others may better understand the importance of multiple saves.

Many years back I was playing Diablo and Diablo II. Now, I always played single player, and on my early pcs I always built them completely myself, so I always set them up to never go into sleep mode or any variant of them. However, after a while, I noticed that occasionally it was cheaper to buy a whole pc and customize it. Often these had a newer operating system. Almost universally they had sleep or other similar modes set to trigger on them.

Here's the point. I'd pause Diablo and Diablo II since I played single player, and step away for a few minutes to get something to drink or eat. I found that the pc had gone into sleep mode and when I brought it back up, I found later that the saves were corrupt. Since both games used a single save, that meant all forward progress was nuked, and I had to start over.

The solution ended up making sure it would never go into sleep mode. So I customized every pc after that to never go into sleep mode.

The poster meanwhile mentions another key issue, sometimes especially older games get messed up when the game loses focus. SoD does not have the issue with corrupted saves if you ALT TAB out to create the duplicate saves when paused. So, fortunately I know that isn't an issue. But you must remember never to save a game when it isn't paused and operates via Steam, anyway, since you never can be completely sure when Steam is going to access your game files to update them, interact with them, cloud-save them, or otherwise be active with them. Not 100 % sure at least. Some games only use Steam as a method of purchase, such as Bionic Dues, and so the problem is limited to updates and cloud-saves, but let the buyer beware.

These problems and issues occasionally happen and are often limited to certain hardware, software, features chosen on your installation, or settings. This was why, especially to the older pc grognards, that the movement to games having multiple saves, multiple game and graphics settings, and so forth was so almost dogmatically preferred. Decades of experience with computers and software, especially games made the experienced players aware of , worried about, and adamant about having the ability to have multiple saves to avoid corruption of games and be able to try different approaches to avoiding glitches, or finding them. Even checkpoints, if the only method of saving, was often similarly disliked, especially if you could only have the last checkpoint save as a backup. The reason again was simple, if you had any experience with pc gaming, you realized that there would always be some person who would be able to come up with some genius attempt to foil the pc enemy, but that would often skirt the checkpoint area if you failed, and therefore guarantee that from that save, if you died, you would never ever be able to successfully come back from that checkpoint and win.

If you noted, for a while at least, there was some skuttlebutt about one of the new games, Shadowrun Returns, about its checkpoints being in bad places, those players wouldn't be happy if that was the sole save, let alone if the game played to a guaranteed death from that sole save while they were away from keyboard.

Anyway, perhaps that provides some perspective to those who constantly harp about how great the single save and offline continuation of simulation is for everybody. If you really believe in a single save, you allow the bad situation in the save to be your continuation, and if you believe in continued simulation while away, you have allowed the game to nuke or kill you while you allowed yourself to save in that position. One or the other is okay, but not both. It is ok to allow yourself your own consequences, if not necessarily fun. As long as you get to try to overcome it, that's the point of bad situations. Or vice-versa, if you have multiple saves in varying situations, you don't mind much if the game simulates what will happen while you are away, as you can simply go to another save after losing 20-200 hours of gameplay on that one bad save. But allow both ... no.

My guess is that most of those who like the offline simulation in this game DO SAVE SCUM sometimes. They also, as they recommend, always say to leave the game while in a good situations (no infestations nearby, no obvious hordes nearby, no body sick or dying with no medicine, adequate resources, yadda yadda). But that limitation does influence two things. The gametime required to ensure you are in a good position (limiting real life accessibility in involved lifestyles) and it impacts on the consequences-are-king-crowd , those who believe that the point of play is realistic simulation and responsibility practice living by the situation in your save (hardcore style players).

That's because hardcore play is about players skill vs the game. Not versus an offline continued simulation which isn't simulating accurately the gameplayers skills with the mouse, inputs, strategies, etc. There is no real point to having a single save if the player isn't in complete control of the gameplay at all times, it no longer measures accurately the player's skill. Likewise there is no real point in having a single save if it becomes corrupted by game settings, pc settings, or other mishaps. Finally, there is no point to a single save, if since you have no control over your gametime (life happens) you then have to pay simulated non-player active simulation consequences for simply having life interfere with playing time.

So, IMHO, we've taken a step back by accepting this scenario with SoD as pc players. The pc is about increasing our options and capabilities. We aren't limited to only Playstation games, Nintendo games, XBox games, etc -- just to the limit of ports from each and pc games, which are unlimited to emulate in theory (i've played Intellivision and old Atari games on my pcs over the years). But it was the realm of adults and those who knew the power of time. If you allow a game to say that while you are away it will do what it decides and worse on your single save, you have no longer a game, but something else. At least saying simulation has some point to it, but it isn't simply simulating the SoD world while you are offline, it is actually simulating you based on , absurdly enough, your lack of input. I find that an astonishing step back well below those moments of checkpoints only, or single autosave games.

But, again, unless you save in a bad situation, you won't have to worry. This is the sort of choice, the ones that the SoD devs chose to implement, that won't likely impact the younger crowd or the fans in the first few games that much, they will push to complete it anyway. It is for those who are older or on their 4-10th run. I would never risk my game enjoyment so completely to a single SoD save and their simulated offline experience. I make use of both when I feel like it, but like what I suspect most of the fans actually do, I always make backup saves (via pausing game, alt tab, save copying), and I choose when I want the simulation to continue or not via adjusting my pc clock. The pc is a tool and I will always use it in such a way as to advance my experience, not solely the experience that someone else advances, desires, or implements. That's the whole point of having a pc, the ability to do anything, and to make it do what you want, you dream, etc. Not to have the devs or Obama tell me what to do.

Cheers.

[Rapture]

Publicado originalmente por Monkeyhuouse:

I guess I was spoiled or used to how most games auto pause when they go out of focus. Hell, I think State of Decay auto pauses when I open the Steam Overlay

But I get pulled away from my PC for a half hour and--even though I'm not far--I lost Maya, and a ton of morale and other things.

I'm not willing to let there be a loss because of stupidity like that, but I don't think I'm very much I'm to starting over right now.

Maybe if Breakdown gets a sale soon, I'll pick it up and try it out. This was a fun romp while it lasted, though =(

Died in a game, decides not to play again.

[Cougarific]

I use the SoD Save Game Manager for exactly that reason. I'm not reloading if I do something legitimately stupid in-game but sometimes real-life stuff causes issues that I, like the OP, would prefer not to deal with.

[MH DOOM]

Publicado originalmente por Rapture:

Publicado originalmente por Monkeyhuouse:

I guess I was spoiled or used to how most games auto pause when they go out of focus. Hell, I think State of Decay auto pauses when I open the Steam Overlay

But I get pulled away from my PC for a half hour and--even though I'm not far--I lost Maya, and a ton of morale and other things.

I'm not willing to let there be a loss because of stupidity like that, but I don't think I'm very much I'm to starting over right now.

Maybe if Breakdown gets a sale soon, I'll pick it up and try it out. This was a fun romp while it lasted, though =(

Died in a game, decides not to play again.

I'm one of those people that if I spend a long time on something and then the progress goes away (especially for a crappy reason), I'm not inspired to do it all over again. Especially when I have quite the backlog, I probably should be clearing that out rather than spending a long time on this game.

I probably will pick this up later on (again, when/if DLC becomes cheap), but I will feel like crap if I started from scratch again, or tried to damage control my own mistake. No reason to play a game if it won't be fun for me.

[Cougarific]

but I will feel like crap if I started from scratch again,

What's funny is, the Breakdown DLC is just about restarting over and over and over again with harder/more zombies each time.

If you don't want to restart, there's no reason to get the DLC.

[MH DOOM]

So I've heard. But, from what I've read, it is a bit more random than, for example, always starting with Marcus, Maya, and Ed, right?

Plus, I won't be making the same mistake again. I just meant starting over right after losing progress so stupidly. I rarely do it, but it does happen, and it discourages me because it just takes the wind out of my sails.