Why must saving a game close entire application?

[toawfan]

This is a royal pain when you want to save a game in progress and then continue playing, especially the very large scenarios. It closes the application and then you have to reopen, find the save file, and continue.

Same with the end of a turn in PBEM. Why do I have to quit playing just because I'm done with my PBEM move? Why can't I stay in the application and now move to opening a saved game or starting another scenario, etc.?

[pionier]

In 3.2 games vs the ai could saved without closeing the game. Only in PBEMs this is the result as a anti-cheat protection I guess, the game does count some information.

Regards!

[toawfan]

That makes sense. Perhaps there needs to be some way to allow a PBEM player to save their moves in progress without that being considered a cheat. Larry puts in many hours for his moves in the big scenarios. It's reasonable that he should be able to save at any point and not risk losing all of his work. That's not a cheat.

However, it does show that he reloaded however many times. A cheater could do the same, retrying moves that didn't work.

I wonder if there's a happy medium for this. This reloading part might matter to others. Frankly, I don't care what anyone does to maximize the best results before sending their turn. And, in the bigger turns, there's not enough time in the day to play and replay and cheat.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: toawfan
...However, it does show that he reloaded however many times. A cheater could do the same, retrying moves that didn't work.

I've found out that my saving to a different file name each time I save will make the reloaded messages go away. I've only found that out ( again ) here recently so the number of reloaded messages from my files should go down in the future. And yes, there aren't enough hours in the day to get me to do my moves over and over until I get "good" results. I'm playing just for the fun of it and the historical what-if and re-doing my moves defeats my purpose.

[walkra]

I am playing FITE, and each turn I take many hours (up to 3 days), but I save when I know I will not continue playing during the day. I dont see risk losing my work before the end of the day of play. it Is true that a cheater could do the same, but it is good to make tools against him (I think that open TOAW some times, tired).

[ralphtricky]

Saving the game and reloading the same save file shouldn't matter, you should be able to save and reload as many times as you want, as long as you reload the same game that you last saved. I actually ignore the name of the file and look at the internal name of the scenario.

I've tested it several times and I haven't figured out why the false positives are happening.

What was triggering a lot of false positives prior to the latest Alpha was that if you loaded a 'do not send' file it counted that as a reload. That's been fixed and you can now look at prior turns without it trigerring a cheat message.

The reason that saving a PBEM game closes the applicaiton is simply because it was the simplest way I could ensure that nothing was left for the editor, etc. The only part of TOAW that I don't like to work on are the pieces related to controlling the flow of a turn. It's unnecessarily convoluted, and used to loop on itself, and I need to rewrite it so that it's understandable before I can allow you to save without quitting. It's just too much work for the gain right now.

Ralph