Depending on internationalization support (on consoles – on PC, you gotta roll your own UI), it may be a bunch of work to support naming saves in a certification-compliant way (proper UI flow, support in the game font for all supported languages, catching all the weird corner cases like blank names, name lengths, etc.). A rule of thumb is: if there is no other text input in the game, it’s reasonably likely that save slots will be used instead of named saves.
Yeah, it was pretty bad at launch. I cleared out a gigabyte worth of saves twice before I finished it the first time
Ppl, it’s very simple. The laws of physics are deterministical, meaning that a blind watchmaker could evolve the state of the game given an initial state. So all you have to do is save the initial state, and then run everything forwards in time. The trick is that you have to run everything faster than real-time because you don’t want to spend several hours waiting for your World of Warcraft toon to level up to 85 every time. So some games like MMORTSes will save the end state and then run everything backwards in time, saving vast amounts.
You can trust me, because I always check my facts before posting nonsense to bulletin bords.
This thread is bringing back x86/PPC floating-point implementation difference and edge-cases multithreaded engine job order physics resolution debugging nightmares, thanks guys.
Don’t forget floating point precision and 3rd party code changing it willy-nilly!
You’re forgetting about the need for a good entropy reversal engine to avoid an infinite past overflow.
I’m still using the same drive, much later. Never had any drive problems. I save a lot.