Braid Dev Says Auto-Save Warnings Waste Time and Money

[draythefingerless]

You should probably read the actual article instead of just the headline. It explains why most of what you just said is wrong.

Speaking of reading why dont you try actually reading my Post before commenting. If you had bothered you would see that all of my fucking points are directed at his comments IN THE ARTICLE.


Normally I would make some snarky comments here insulting you and your reading comprehension but I think you already did that yourself.

Alright, I guess if you wanna play that game, I'll requote your post with replies purely taken from the article:

Man this guy has got some really petty for reasons to hate on console development.

"which costs significant time and money".

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.

It also seems like it would be a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to implement then his suggestion.

which costs significant time and money

It lets me know as soon as I start up a game wether or not I need to worry about saving it.

It helps prevent people from turning off their system mid save and loosing a lot of their progress.

It informs people what the symbol that appears in the corner of their screen is.

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

Wow, and I only had to use two actual quotes. So who's supposed to be making fun of who's reading comprehension? Because it seems pretty apparent to me why I would assume you hadn't actually read the article. Though there is one tidbit of your reply that can't really be answered with quotes from the article:

What the hell is three days supposed to mean. Thats a rather useless term when you are talking about a development team.

Odds are he's referring to man-hours, so in this case it takes 72 hours worth of developer time (be it a single person taking a literal 3 days, or a team with that time divvied-up among them) to implement this feature. This is also how he would come the conclusion that the other certification hoops a developer has to jump through can cost up to decades worth of time, because when you have a development team the size that they are today working over the course of a couple years on a game, you easily get probably over a hundred years worth of man-hours that needs to be accounted for.

3 days for Jonathan Blow, cause he sucks at programming, it would take me about 2 hours to implement this. His system also doesnt provide for the fact that some save files are more complex and entrenched and related with game data, not to mention file size. what he is saying would avoid man hours and avoid that pesky auto save warning, but it would load your computer with twice the work. granted its not much, but go to a game like witcher 2 where each save file is 10x bigger than minecraft and the system starts to see its optimization issues.

bottom line is, there is no definitive answer to this issue, there is no absolute way of saving data regarding games. his method works sometimes, the auto saving warning works other times.

 

[Charli]

I guess I sort of see what he's saying, but as usual he's being too much of a cock about it.

Yes, there are MILLIONS of flaws in the way video games are developed and programmed in Mainstream. But... I see that as one of the ones that will fade away in time. Not one that needs critical look at. We know. It's an outdated practice by now, Developers need to re-educate their teams, but they don't because the formula is easier to stick by.

It's not a HUGE deal, and certainly not one that needs an article Escapist *raise eyebrow*.
But yes, I see the point. And sure, get the word out there to those who needs to see it.

Development time IS expensive and every cut made to superfluous practices is a plus for them.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

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.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

3 days for Jonathan Blow, cause he sucks at programming, it would take me about 2 hours to implement this.

Because you've made a game for the 360?

His system also doesnt provide for the fact that some save files are more complex and entrenched and related with game data, not to mention file size. what he is saying would avoid man hours and avoid that pesky auto save warning, but it would load your computer with twice the work. granted its not much, but go to a game like witcher 2 where each save file is 10x bigger than minecraft and the system starts to see its optimization issues.

See, I don't know about your computer, but my computer isn't an X-Box 360; or did you forget what this whole article/discussion was about?

bottom line is, there is no definitive answer to this issue, there is no absolute way of saving data regarding games. his method works sometimes, the auto saving warning works other times.

And heaven forbid it be up to the developer of the game, and not some corporation who's never made a game in their lives, to decide which is the best system for their game.

 

[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.