Monosaves!

Hi folks! Every once in a while we release an update containing only “under-the-hood” changes, and this is one of those. A lot of people don’t really care about the back-end technical stuff, and that’s totally fine; please feel free to skip down to the ‘Also in this build’ bugfix section at the bottom of this post if that’s you!

But for me, the most exciting parts of this update are up here at the top, and maybe you’ll like them too!

New in this build:

• New save file format!

  Previously, when saving a game we saved out three separate files; the save itself, a tiny “meta” file which contained information about the save, to be used in the desktop interface and elsewhere (this is how the desktop knows how many subscribers you have in every save file without actually loading them all), and a screenshot of the save to be used in the desktop launcher interface. Now we save all of those three things into a single file. A “monosave”, if you will. This dramatically simplifies backing up saves and submitting them in bug reports and etc; there’s only one file to copy and sync, now!

  The most exciting part of this is that the new “monosave” file format is forwards compatible with old versions of the game; saves from this build can still be loaded in older builds! (I’m downright smug over figuring out how to make that work!)

  Side-note: we are still saving out a separate ‘meta’ file when we save, just in case somebody does want to jump back to an old build of the game which would prefer to have those meta files, but starting from this version of the game we only read ‘meta’ files when loading really old saves which aren’t in the new monosave format.

• Better handling of file system errors!

  If you run out of disk space while saving the game, we now tell you about it and let the game keep running, so you can alt-tab out and maybe clear up some room then try again!

• Better handling of file errors!

  Previously, if you tried to load a corrupted or truncated save file, the game would do its best to load as much data as it could from the file, but would then leave the rest of the data empty; in a worst-case scenario, it could act as if it had successfully loaded your save but leave you with a brand new and completely empty game! Now we’ll instead pop up an error message to let you know that the file was corrupt or unreadable, and return you to the in-game desktop interface so you can try loading one of its periodic backups instead.

• Running low on disk space?

  We now check for low available disk space while you’re in the in-game desktop interface, and we’ll display a warning message if your disk is almost full, just as a gentle reminder that you might want to clear up some space before starting or loading into a game.

• Saved pathing

  Wait, what’s this one doing way down here? This totally belongs right up at the top, certainly above the boring back-end technical stuff like “new save format”!

  In this build, we now save and restore the paths that players were following at the time of the save. This fixes an old old bug which caused players who were on flight paths or on board vehicles when a save happened to fall off of them after a load. (which could often wind up with those players drowning in the sea or ending up in inactive or high-level regions and then re-spawning somewhere super inconvenient).

  Similarly, players who were waiting at a vehicle depot when the save happened will continue waiting there after the save is re-loaded, instead of changing their minds and wandering off to do something different!

Also in this build:

• Fixed a bug in the previous update which had the “alchemy_desk_a” scenery item displaying the “alchemy_desk_b” model. Oops!
• Fixed a bug which was causing gravity to not be applied to certain combat effect sub-particles (water droplets, little bits of gravel falling off of larger rocks, etc); this has actually been broken since the Dungeons update and nobody had mentioned it to me!
• Fixed tab colors for second-level tabbed window interfaces (for example, in the ability editor and in the character model editor); unselected tabs were being drawn in the same color as selected tabs, which could make it tricky to see which tab was selected! Now fixed.

Thanks so much to everybody who did early testing of this update!

Will talk again soon!