SAVE & RESUME MISSION Feature

[GrEaSeLiTeNiN]

Busier adults may not have a lot of time to finish longer missions like those by RotorOps having up to 4 zones to conquer which could take a while. Being able to save the progress and resume it at a later time would be a great feature to have in the game's basic mission options. 

Edited April 15, 2023 by GrEaSeLiTeNiN

[SharpeXB]

Looks like this is being worked on. Indeed a very important feature since without it the long complex missions in scripted campaigns and such are quite unapproachable for the average player. 

 

[GrEaSeLiTeNiN]

Wow requested since 2016 - 7 years!
I hope they don't let "updates break saves" stop them. It's acceptable that could happen. 

[SharpeXB]

I have a hard time understanding how the game can save a track of an entire mission, which you can actually take over and play. But it can’t save a snapshot of that same thing? Back when the track feature actually worked you could load a replay of the mission and just fast forward to where you left off. But that was pretty cumbersome and of course that solution won’t work today. 
yeah it’s totally understandable that a game update could break the save. That’s acceptable. 

Edited April 16, 2023 by SharpeXB

[cfrag]

11 hours ago, GrEaSeLiTeNiN said:

Wow requested since 2016 - 7 years!

That ability was requested since day one, and before that IIRC for LOMAC, DCS' predecessor (tbh, I'm a bit hazy wrt "Flanker's" save/resume ability. I don't recall it could). I'm slightly surprised that @GrEaSeLiTeNiN doesn't recall that DCS never had save/restore ability and that we all wished it did. Loudly  

I think what happened is that - at the end of the last century - saving and restoring sessions was not common in flight simulators (although at least one sim that shall not be named did sport such a feature), and hence little effort went into putting in a foundation to support persistence. The simulator model simply was initialized to a "start game state" at the start of the mission, and there were no means to re-initialize it to an arbitrary state that it could continue from (e.g. with missiles in the air, units damaged, munitions expended, goals half met). Since this is always a core ability, it is a very, very difficult (read: expensive) ability to add after the fact. Accordingly, I believe we never got to see it appear in DCS (we need to recall that DCS essentially relies on the foundations laid down by Flanker/LOMAC two decades ago). So when it comes to persistence ("save/resume"), we are basically playing a game from the last millennium, very much like my then-favorite "F/A-18 Hornet" by GraphSim and Parsoft's "A-10 Attack", of which DCS seems like a much, much more exciting rendition. Technology-wise, the persistence model seems on the same level: inexistent.

I'm hopeful that this may change in the future, but from what I've read about the 'dynamic campaign' feature, that appears to be a way around a true save/resume system to a 'ckeckpoint' analogue, where everything resets to certain checkpoints and re-start (rather than resume) from those points.

Edited April 16, 2023 by cfrag

[Ironhand]

Back in the LOMAC/FC1.x days, I think it was, there was a period of time when a save/restore was available. I know because I was using it.