Ability to save a mission

[markturner1960]

This would be a huge benefit……so many times I have simply not bothered to carry on with a mission as I can’t be bothered to replay the same 30 or 40 minutes (or whatever) again and again while I figure out how to either not get killed or do something. 
 

Is this ever going to be possible? Or is the way DCS is built precluding this?

[SharpeXB]

Yes, That feature is planned.

“Here are some of the interesting functionality improvements coming to DCS:

Save Game. Our new game persistence system will allow you to save mid-mission and return to that save point at a later time.”

 

Edited April 2, 2024 by SharpeXB

[Waxi]

Looking forward to this feature. As a father of two, I usually do not find the time to fly long missions in one go and the workaround using the Save/Load Track feature is not reliable.

[SharpeXB]

Just imagine how many more DLC Campaigns they’ll sell. Right now it probably takes the average person a year to play through one of those

[falcon_120]

Im so much waiting for this huge huge quality of life feature to arrive. It will hugely improve the fun factor of the simulation and let you enjoy a long mission.

I wonder if it will be compatible with the future Dynamic Campaign, that'd be lovely.

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[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, falcon_120 said:

I wonder if it will be compatible with the future Dynamic Campaign, that'd be lovely.

I would say that’s a must. In fact a DC without the ability to save mission progress would be rather useless or unapproachable. 

[cfrag]

On 5/24/2024 at 3:59 PM, Waxi said:

Looking forward to this feature. As a father of two, I usually do not find the time to fly long missions in one go and the workaround using the Save/Load Track feature is not reliable.

Not to be too snarky, but a) yes, that save game feature would indeed be great and b) your kids will likely be able to legally drink alcohol when it arrives...

[SharpeXB]

I always wondered why such a feature is so much work. All it means is having a time stamp or whatever on the replay track. 

[falcon_120]

I would say that’s a must. In fact a DC without the ability to save mission progress would be rather useless or unapproachable. 

Well i always assumed the DC would save the mission or phase you're in, in a similar way you have today in community made DC like retention/liberation or DCE, a whole different thing is having saved files "in mission", allowing you to for example save the mission after the cold start and jump back in another day right where you left it.

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[Waxi]

13 hours ago, cfrag said:

[...] your kids will likely be able to legally drink alcohol when it arrives...

 

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I always wondered why such a feature is so much work. All it means is having a time stamp or whatever on the replay track. 

To my understanding, Tracks just record player inputs and are a debugging tool. If this is true, Tracks do not save the mission state but start a new instance of the mission and just replay the recorded player inputs. For instance, while replaying the same Track twice, I noticed different air defense behavior and different faults due to damage caused by SAM hits.

If I recall correctly, the Save Game feature announced earlier this year is supposed to be based on new features that have been added for the Dynamic Campaign feature that is in the works.

[cfrag]

29 minutes ago, Waxi said:

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I always wondered why such a feature is so much work. All it means is having a time stamp or whatever on the replay track. 

To my understanding, Tracks just record player inputs and are a debugging tool.

They surely started as such, and as you say, they are meant to replay (for debugging purposes) what happened by feeding recorded input to the mission instead of reading control inputs (that is why the entire mission is part of the track) literally 're-playing' it. The current track replay feature is very buggy, and the longer the mission, the more it departs from the original (it can take less than a minute for a mission to desynch). Not to mention the fact that you can't advance nor rewind track.

A save feature writes the current state of the game to disk, a snapshot of the current situation so to speak -- as if you 'froze' the mission in memory and stopped DCS from continuing. To resume, you load that frozen state into memory, and then 'continue' DCS. A track file is akin to a recorded chess match where all moves are recorded, and the 'saved' state is re-created by re-playing all moves one after the other. In DCS, unfortunately, there can be things happening between re-executing these moves, like pieces getting lost, or moved to other places, making the end result not at all what was saved.

Worse, even if you wanted to use the track feature as an ersatz save, you'd have to wait through the entire time that was recorded up to then. So, if you played 30 minutes, then quit, and loaded the track to restart, the mission will have to play through the 30 Minutes to get to the point where you quit. After 30 minutes, I think that there's a good 90% likelihood that the mission departed from your original experience in a significant way.   

From all that I've seen of DCS, it seems to have been organically growing since the LOMAC days, and never was designed with a state saving feature in mind. If your application lacks this quite fundamental state design, implementing it after the fact will be painful indeed, and likely buggy indeed: trying to save the state of an inherently stateless construct is often likened to two Greek myths: that of Hercules and Sisyphus. [Queue "Like a rolling stone"]

Edited May 26, 2024 by cfrag

[falcon_120]

I always wondered why such a feature is so much work. All it means is having a time stamp or whatever on the replay track. 

That would not work as it is now, the track replay is totally inconsistent in a mission longer than 10 min, many times shows totally different results, like a missile you evaded hits you in the track.

So i guess part of why is taking so long is that requires a different approach to how the track system is currently implemented.

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[SharpeXB]

6 hours ago, falcon_120 said:

That would not work as it is now, the track replay is totally inconsistent in a mission longer than 10 min, many times shows totally different results, like a missile you evaded hits you in the track.

I don’t figure this working that way literally, but just to make a point. This isn’t an insurmountable task. All things considered it’s probably one of the easiest things to add to the game. And the most important. 

7 hours ago, Waxi said:

If I recall correctly, the Save Game feature announced earlier this year is supposed to be based on new features that have been added for the Dynamic Campaign feature that is in the works.

Certainly. Again a DC without this feature would be rather worthless. 

[cfrag]

16 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

All things considered it’s probably one of the easiest things to add to the game.

It seems to me that you are not considering much, and pardon me if I am mistaken, you do not seem to be knowledgeable in things relating to application programming. To save a game you need to save the current state, and then be able to recall and set the state arbitrarily. A 'state' is the sum of each and every variable, all running and scheduled tasks, and the configurations of all inputs and outputs (I'm not talking about game controllers - but logic queues). If you did your job right, and designed your applications along those lines, yes, saving can be achieved rather painlessly.

DCS does not appear to be an application that was engineered in that regard. At all. So, in order to implement a save feature, the devs will have to re-engineer a foundation that keeps track of of all states, must not overlook a single stray thing that keeps track of something, encode this, and save to storage. And that's only half the fare. Then they have to devise a way to allow them to read this back, set their game up exactly as is was when you saved, again never overlooking a single dependency in a sea of things that are mutually dependent (for example, they have to find a way to 'freeze' each and every Lua script in your mission save to storage, and then somehow set it up so that it can continue where it left off. The Lua interpreter was not built for that). 

Adding save is something that is easy if your app was designed for it. Nothing in DCS suggests that this is the case. My current understanding of DCS leads me to believe that a version of DCS that can save and restore a game state will fully break mission backward compatibility.

[SharpeXB]

5 hours ago, cfrag said:

It seems to me that you are not considering much, and pardon me if I am mistaken, you do not seem to be knowledgeable in things relating to application programming.

True But I know all other programs and games are capable of doing this so I’m sure DCS can too. And it will.

[Sandman1330]

I have so many campaigns I'm itching to play, but I'm waiting for this feature to come first. Hopefully soon!