Bugs, Crashes & Power Outages

[Iridia]

I just lost a very promising 19th level character ready for an Ultra ending--finished Gaab'bay's quests, just ready to get crowned Lawful with fire immunity. I lost the character because the game crashed and I hadn't thought to back up the save file.

Okay, I know I should've backed up the save file, but can't situations like this be prevented? Your character can get completely wiped because of a power outage or a game crash because the game deletes the save file when you load the game, then creates it again when you save. What if, instead, it kept the save file, updated it when you saved, and deleted it only when the character died? That way, a power outage or crash would simply put you back to whenever you last saved.

The way things are now, you're encouraged to halfway savescum to prevent from losing your character due to a crash or outage. You have to back up the save file, then restore from the save file if the game crashes. Both of the times I've won the game, I had to recover from one or more crashes.

No game this complex can be made absolutely bug-free, and even if it could be, you still couldn't stop the cat from stepping on the power strip and killing your character (no treats for you today, Tiger).

Why can't this be changed? Sensible ADOM players will back up their save files. Can't the game do that for us, just keeping the old save file until the new one is successfully stored, and deleting it when a character dies?

[Silfir]

It's so that players can't simply quit the game or alt-F4 out of it to reload the old save. Technically. Of course, if things are such that players feel the need to manually back up their saves even if they have no intention of ever savescumming, it might be better to have backup functionality after all.

[Stingray1]

There is a Request for Enhancement out for something along these lines.

[unholy]

I have no idea how it worked, but I remember that nethack (vanilla, played locally) had some kind of system to recover from crashes and power outage. I remember that at least one of my game has been saved that way. It wasn't working 100% of the time though. Plus quitting by ctrl-alt-del didn't trigger the recovery system.

[Iridia]

That's a partial solution, but wouldn't keeping the save file be more reliable? With that method, the only way to lose your game would be if the game messed up while saving and corrupted the save file.

That being the case, I wonder if perhaps keeping the save file would work better *without* any autosave? An autosave done in "emergency" (game crash) conditions could be corrupted, or crash again when loaded. Or perhaps, if an autosave-on-crash function is present in addition to keeping the save file while the game is active, the autosave created at crash could be saved as a separate file which you could try to use, and if that didn't work, return to the normal save file and lose whatever progress you had before the crash.

[Singbird]

I don't think there's any need for save-on-crash if we have an auto-save or a quick-save. At most this might be helpful for some debugging, and there're cases you cannot do a save-on-crash anyway.

[Whippy]

Couldn't there be two different save files? Like a Temp file and the proper file that the player saves himself. The Temp file could save each time the PC enters a new place or a new level in a dungeon etc.

At the moment the proper save file gets deleted when the player either quits or dies. The Temp file would also get deleted when the PC quits or dies but couldn't there be a certain way to distuinguish between closing the game properly with Shift+Q/Shift+S, and then pressing the Q on the main menu to quit out of ADOM, as apposed to a power outage and these buttons aren't pressed?

I feel as though I've worded this completely wrong but I hope someone gets the gist of what I'm suggesting

[grobblewobble]

For ADOM II something like this is really badly needed. About 50% of my games end with a fatal exception.