I always praise a well written reply even if it's a rude one.
But tell me,if a batch file and a few lines of code can generate backup files,is it *so* hard to add a boolean option [yes/no] on a unity game in order to make a copy of a backup file with the tag [OLD_SAVE] every N-th day?
Side note, I'm currently struggling with the stupid windows backup system because apparently it can't backup on the same disk as the game is . That means I'll have to use the batch file or god forbid use third party programs to do it for me.
Potentially, yes, actually. If you back up a game
while it is running there will be some inconsistencies in that backup, for the simple reason that the game is running, and time taken to make that backup is some figure greater than zero.
Let's look at an example of an in-game save, that runs "in the background" (in Unity, it's running as (one of many I'd suspect), coroutines) and the player can continue playing while it runs.
At some point the save game routine will save the players inventory. At some other point (be it sooner or later) even if only milliseconds later, it will back up all the player placed blocks on the map.
So what could happen is a dupe bug, whereby for example, the player places a block
after their inventory has been backed up, and
before the player placed blocks have been saved. Hey presto, a free block.
Alternately, if the game tries to freeze the world, as the current save game routine de facto does (since it runs after the world has been shut down), then the player gets a lag event while everything is paused and the game is saved. No doubt the Gods Of IT will ensure that pause will occur at the very worst possible time, right as the player was about to hit or dodge a zombie say, and then you'll get people complaining about seemingly random lag events in the game.
Moreover, having designed this in-game periodic save feature, the Pimps would then need to support it and potentially update it as the game went through each of it's remaining Alphas, wherein content is still subject to change, which could impact on what this routine has to save or not save. They would have to design an in-game UI scene for it, with sufficient options to allow the player to tailor to their own preferences, and to prevent it turning into bloatware as a new instance of the save game file was created every time the player exited the game.
Oh, and they'd also have to do this both for SP and MP and headless servers to.
And the pay off for all of that, is relieving the player of having to open up Explorer, select the save game directory, and copy it to anywhere else on their computer. That's really not hard to do, and I'd struggle to see how someone could plausibly claim to not know how to do that.
Now, once the game goes Gold, the potential re-work of the periodic save game goes away,
and the benefit goes up (in a more polished product), and it becomes something much more worth doing. I just don't see it as being
worth their time while still in Alpha, given how
easy it is for players to back up their own games themselves.
And finally, my first question when
anyone talks about a data loss
of any kind is "Did you back up?"
(i did change the daylenght shortly before hordenight tough)
