An Autosave feature

Authoring Inform 7
#1

Hello,

in my WIP I want to make a number of timed puzzles easier on the player by adding something like an autosave feature. The game will save at the beginning of a scene and then restore when the player has died, or the time has run out.
Saving the game is an out of world action in I7, and the corresponding syntax seems to be

try saving the game

Which works as so far that it prompts the player to save his game. Is there a way to do this silently, in the background?
The documentation doesn’t say to much about this feature.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

#2

No. The filename-choosing dialogue box is all up to the interpreter; Inform just tells it that the player wants to save and the interpreter does everything else.

#3

Not true, Draconis. It is possible in Glulx. The “Ultra Undo” extension does this, for example, to replace in-memory UNDO storage with disk-based save files.

#4

Thanks, zarf. I will have a look at it.

#5

Sorry, I should have clarified: I was referring to the Z-machine. (I still don’t fully understand Glulx.)

#6

Looking at the code, it seems to be I6 code, which I can’t read, unfortunately.

I keeps I’ll work with the popup-box. It should fulfill the purpose.

#7

Doesn’t Kerkerkruip perform a sort of autosave? Or am I making things Up?

#8

It does, but at every turn rather than only at set points.

It wouldn’t be hard to make an extension to do what you want, but I can’t do it now on my phone :wink:

#9

I’m going to sleep now anyway, so you have 8 hrs. :slight_smile:

#10

The Ultra Undo code is very nicely documented! I was able to adapt it into a simple Autosave extension, which has worked so far (although admittedly I haven’t tested it that thoroughly).

github.com/i7/extensions/blob/m … tosave.i7x

#11

I thought I had seen another saving extension! (Wait, no you only just added it.)

And thanks for your nice comments on Ultra Undo.

#12

The extension I supplied for Kerkerkruip provides all the I7 phrases you’d need to do this:

github.com/i7/kerkerkruip/blob/ … adeath.i7x

You’d just need to delete the rules you don’t want, and use the phrases provided to write your own behavior.

#13

Wow, thank you, everyone, this is more than I could have asked for.