Quick Resume

[beni]

Just saw a test video to Darksiders 2 and they have an awesome feature:

You know how many games have a "Resume" button in the menu that loads your last save game before you left the game.

Now in Darksiders 2 they're not only loading the menu at the start, but also your save game, pause it and use some fancy slow camera panning to make a nice menu screen.

If you press "Resume" the camera rearranges and the game continues from just exactly the point you saved your game.

Seamlessly. Pretty cool in my opinion.

Just a thought for when we get to a point this is relevant.

[x3n]

Yea I know this from other games as well (maybe not seamlessly, but a quick reloading if the save game was in the same level). However it is difficult to implement because you need to find the differences between the old and the new game state and reload only the objects that have changed. This is usually easier if you have pre-defined check points instead of saving at arbitrary times. These games then often "forget" some parts of the old game state, e.g. dead bodies on the floor vanish, projectiles are removed, or the player stands still after loading even though he was right in the middle of a movement before. So obviously there's a trade off between speed and accuracy (and implementation effort) and I'm not sure which solution I would prefer.

[beni]

You are right. I didn't think about how one would implement this. We don't even have save games yet either.

For saving I'd really prefer the option to save everywhere almost anytime. Doesn't have to be a perfect recreation of the game state, but the checkpoint solution so many games use nowadays is a solution I don't like at all. Maybe for an autosave of quick loading, yes, but the option to save immediately should be there as well.