PC Really bad - just horrible...

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.
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Not to mention, and then they have to remove it all cleanly, pulling it out of everywhere it appears in the code when Alpha is over, because they don't want the feature available as it is considered cheating.

 
Not to mention, and then they have to remove it all cleanly, pulling it out of everywhere it appears in the code when Alpha is over, because they don't want the feature available as it is considered cheating.
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I think that'll be hard for TFP to enforce actually. Clearly the game is regularly saving ongoing game data into the save game files (at least for headless servers), so they're not worried per se about periodic backups occurring. I must admit, I haven't actually tried running batch files to perform periodic backups of local client save game files, so I've never actually tested whether the local client behaves the same way.

If the client does work the same way as the headless server, and TFP were really keen on preventing players from using periodic saves as a "get out of jail / unexpected death" feature, then the client would have to ensure it retained the game state in memory, and wrote to the save files only on exit.

Interesting now that I think about it, I might go set up a periodic batch process targeting local client save game files and see whether the local client is behaving that way or not. I know for the little games I've made so far in Unity, I've never bothered writing back to the save game files until exit time, it'd be interesting to see if TFP does the same.

 
I doubt there will ever be a save game feature that would allow players to conveniently get a redo by saving just before a quest or just before the blood moon. There is a reason the game saves over itself in a single save file every couple seconds. No time travel

 
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I don't think they'll try to enforce, just saying they won't make what they consider cheating convenient.

The concept of keeping data in memory until exit would be bad. Any power outage and your game is toast. Sure it could keep the last file in tact, but that could have been a few hours of gameplay ago.

 
I doubt there will ever be a save game feature that would allow players to conveniently get a redo by saving just before a quest or just before the blood moon. There is a reason the game saves over itself in a single save file every couple seconds. No time travel
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I'd love to know what the Devs are doing in this respect. All the games I've made in Unity have been small arcade like games, but there's one I'm hoping to sell eventually and the savegame function could be considerable there.

I don't think they'll try to enforce, just saying they won't make what they consider cheating convenient.
The concept of keeping data in memory until exit would be bad. Any power outage and your game is toast. Sure it could keep the last file in tact, but that could have been a few hours of gameplay ago.
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True, keeping it all in memory could have some issues for any sort of Abend occurring.

 
but no one could reasonably claim they don't know how to copy files, and any person making such a claim, really ought not be playing Alpha-state games.

I, for one, hope that the Pimps don't spend a minute of their time catering for such players just personally.
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I am willing to bet most of the money the pimps made came from people who don't know how to backup, or knew that they even needed to, and I would never insult them, nor exclude them from my game. I wouldn't call nor insinuate in any way, that they are stupid for not having the clairvoyance to already know what was needed of them for smooth operation of my complex sandbox game.

If they had made me hundreds of millions of dollars, believing in my dream, players of all sorts of skill levels... Of all sorts of ages... Of many walks of life... with tears in my eyes I would say I love them, and thank them. And the technical issues you players have I absolutely freaking will try to "cater" fix for you, especially in a 5+ year long project. I would not hide behind "alpha" at that point and insult them for not understanding it. I would EXPECT them to have high expectations of a game that has been out this long. I would hope basic things are working good, and I would hope things that aren't get pointed out to me. Things I cannot do in a timely manner I would hope I would tell them about it and why.

Please.

I ask the people of this forum... the mods... the devs... the users...

Please don't say someone isn't deserving to be here, just because they are not versed in the ways of computers.

If they bark like an angry hurt dog, as I did when I was new... please don't kick them. Become better at recognizing something is wrong and helping them. They will never ever forget this.

Take care folks.

 
I am willing to bet most of the money the pimps made came from people who don't know how to backup, or knew that they even needed to, and I would never insult them, nor exclude them from my game. I wouldn't call nor insinuate in any way, that they are stupid for not having the clairvoyance to already know what was needed of them for smooth operation of my complex sandbox game.
If they had made me hundreds of millions of dollars, believing in my dream, players of all sorts of skill levels... Of all sorts of ages... Of many walks of life... with tears in my eyes I would say I love them, and thank them. And the technical issues you players have I absolutely freaking will try to "cater" fix for you, especially in a 5+ year long project. I would not hide behind "alpha" at that point and insult them for not understanding it. I would EXPECT them to have high expectations of a game that has been out this long. I would hope basic things are working good, and I would hope things that aren't get pointed out to me. Things I cannot do in a timely manner I would hope I would tell them about it and why.

Please.

I ask the people of this forum... the mods... the devs... the users...

Please don't say someone isn't deserving to be here, just because they are not versed in the ways of computers.

If they bark like an angry hurt dog, as I did when I was new... please don't kick them. Become better at recognizing something is wrong and helping them. They will never ever forget this.

Take care folks.
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Where did I do any of the following: insult someone, exclude them from the game, insinuate they were stupid, demand they be clairvoyants, say they weren't deserving to be here, or kick them?

For the record, I have nothing but sympathy for someone who loses data. That said, anyone owning a computer needs to understand that they're not perfect devices, and any data on them, will, sooner or later, be lost, if they don't back it up.

And that's not an Alpha thing, or a 7DaysToDie thing, or a Windows thing, or an Intel thing, it's an immutable, inescapable fact of computers.

So, no matter what save game features may come into the game at some point, whether they be more or less advanced/frequent/configurable/whatever than we have now, anyone not backing up their save game files, will, eventually, lose them.

If someone buys a computer, and puts data on it that they don't want to lose, but also makes no effort to back that data up, then, ultimately, they have only themselves to blame for its inevitable loss.

To give you a concrete, real-life example, that I've directly seen some people complain about, on both these forums and the Steam ones to, complaints about loss of save game files due to power outages, of save game files that were hundreds of days progressed, yet never once backed up.

Maybe the Pimps can give players more options on save games, maybe they can do it in a way that doesn't let the player have an "instant replay" function which the Pimps actually don't want players to have, but a player who never backs up their files, will, one way or another, eventually lose them, and that is absolutely not the Pimps fault, nor can they do anything to prevent the loss.

And I don't say that to look down on people who don't back up, or belittle the inconvenience of their loss, but to remind people that these wonderful devices we all enjoy spending so much time on, are only.... temporarily working. ;-)

 
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Lots of people around here get offended on behalf of other people. We never hear directly from these other people though...

 
Is this where I post that I've never had a save game get corrupt? (Bad memory though, so it may have happened).

 
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