Talk:Plan for save states

TMC (talk) 02:13, 12 April 2015 (PDT) -- I've been intending this for a while. I see no reason not to use RSAV with extra data, especially since almost everything that's saved in a "complete" save state, we would also want to allow optionally saving in regular saves. In fact there's only a single piece of data that I can think of that should be omitted in regular saves: the state of the script interpreter. Because if the script data in the .rpg changes, the script interpreter state would become invalid and have to be thrown out. I really would love to be able to save interpreter state in regular saves, but it seems that it would require a complicated system where either the scripts are resumed if possible, or otherwise the 'load game' script is triggered instead so that you can restart everything manually. (In other words, distinguish between saved games and save states.) Clearly most users would get it wrong. Alternatively, we could allow saving script state only if you disable the ability to port your saves to newer versions of the game. Or just hide it as an advanced feature.

PS: Aside from fixing the Android port, I'm really keen to combine save states with input recording (.ohrkeys) for record-and-replay. Rewind to 8 seconds ago to try to figure out why a bug just happened. Edit the game to fix the problem, rewind before the bug occurs, and resume! A couple weeks ago I went to an awesome talk by O'Callahan of Mozilla on their miraculous rr tool (record-and-replay). Basically, you should already be able to do what I just described by using rr, with minimal overhead, though I haven't tried it yet, and live-previewing isn't going to work. rr only works on Linux.