Shadowrun Shadowrun Returns - Dead Man's Switch Original Campaign

[Junmarko]

Given that they have not given any release date for the current month, chances are the game will be delayed. They just have not anounced it yet.

Yeah, that's always a common pattern. I bet they'll announce late March, and it'll end up being mid June.

 

[Morality Games]

In this case a delay would be welcome. I worried about how much better Berlin could be than the OC with so short a development time.

 

[Gord]

Is the beta for the save-anywhere patch out already?

 

[veryalien]

Is the beta for the save-anywhere patch out already?

I'm going to laugh when this new save system has more bugs than a seedy motel room in Nairobi.

 

[Zetor]

Beta patch is out. More info here - http://www.shadowrun.com/forums/discussion/37327/release-notes-beta-1-2-0

I'm sure we'll know whether it's any good for UGC soon and how buggy the implementation is -- I'd test it myself, but I'm at a conference and stuff.

 

[Phinx]

After a short time of testing through the editor here is what I have found so far.
- new quicksaves implemented.
- in the current scene if you save after someone has died they stay dead when you load the game. Although everything still respawns upon exiting and re-entering a scene. Same with quests/conversations which will stay the same upon reload but changing scenes will reset everything unless story triggers are used.
- reloading still triggers at map start triggers, so if you have a spawn point set from map start or another trigger then that is where you will spawn. Basically you will not spawn at the exact location where you last saved the game, but instead you will spawn where you set your player spawner upon map start.
- noticed quite a few bugs that are new in my UGC that worked fine pre-patch and for some reason F1 no longer brings up debug, making it a major pain in the backside to fix the bugs. So my early impressions in codex terms is decline.

 

[sea]

After a short time of testing through the editor here is what I have found so far.
- new quicksaves implemented.
- in the current scene if you save after someone has died they stay dead when you load the game. Although everything still respawns upon exiting and re-entering a scene. Same with quests/conversations which will stay the same upon reload but changing scenes will reset everything unless story triggers are used.
- reloading still triggers at map start triggers, so if you have a spawn point set from map start or another trigger then that is where you will spawn. Basically you will not spawn at the exact location where you last saved the game, but instead you will spawn where you set your player spawner upon map start.
- noticed quite a few bugs that are new in my UGC that worked fine pre-patch and for some reason F1 no longer brings up debug, making it a major pain in the backside to fix the bugs. So my early impressions in codex terms is decline.

Guess I'm never making a mod for this game, then.

 

[DeepOcean]

After a short time of testing through the editor here is what I have found so far.
- new quicksaves implemented.
- in the current scene if you save after someone has died they stay dead when you load the game. Although everything still respawns upon exiting and re-entering a scene. Same with quests/conversations which will stay the same upon reload but changing scenes will reset everything unless story triggers are used.
- reloading still triggers at map start triggers, so if you have a spawn point set from map start or another trigger then that is where you will spawn. Basically you will not spawn at the exact location where you last saved the game, but instead you will spawn where you set your player spawner upon map start.
- noticed quite a few bugs that are new in my UGC that worked fine pre-patch and for some reason F1 no longer brings up debug, making it a major pain in the backside to fix the bugs. So my early impressions in codex terms is decline.

So they half-assed the save system as expected, and my desire to buy Dragonfall suddenly disappeared.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Now that we have MMX and Blackguards, it's going to be a looong time till I buy Dragonfall.

 

[Roguey]

next Tuesday we'll be releasing a trailer, screenshots, and an official release date for Shadowrun: Dragonfall

Sounds like it slipped to February 4th.

 

[veryalien]

After a short time of testing through the editor here is what I have found so far.
- new quicksaves implemented.
- in the current scene if you save after someone has died they stay dead when you load the game. Although everything still respawns upon exiting and re-entering a scene. Same with quests/conversations which will stay the same upon reload but changing scenes will reset everything unless story triggers are used.
- reloading still triggers at map start triggers, so if you have a spawn point set from map start or another trigger then that is where you will spawn. Basically you will not spawn at the exact location where you last saved the game, but instead you will spawn where you set your player spawner upon map start.
- noticed quite a few bugs that are new in my UGC that worked fine pre-patch and for some reason F1 no longer brings up debug, making it a major pain in the backside to fix the bugs. So my early impressions in codex terms is decline.

So they half-assed the save system as expected, and my desire to buy Dragonfall suddenly disappeared.

This is ridiculous? Why is it so hard to implement a save system? At the absolute worst case you do what Microsoft Word used to do in the old days and just dump core. Just dump out the in game memory to a file and reload it later. Just put everything in one massive structure and write it out bit by bit and re-read it. It's ineffecient, and will eat up a lot of disk space but it's still better than this shit.

 

[DalekFlay]

I would assume that if it were super easy they wouldn't have so many problems doing it. Whether it's the engine, their tools or whatever else I have no idea, but the idea they could flip an easy switch to have perfect saving but refuse to do so is kind of retarded.

In any event I didn't mind the saving in the original version at all. I don't save scum in turn-based games.

 

[DeepOcean]

I would assume that if it were super easy they wouldn't have so many problems doing it. Whether it's the engine, their tools or whatever else I have no idea, but the idea they could flip an easy switch to have perfect saving but refuse to do so is kind of retarded.

In any event I didn't mind the saving in the original version at all. I don't save scum in turn-based games.

There were a few reasons to why Shadowrun returns was so easy, the saving system was one of them. Turn-based games and checkpoint saving don't get along all that well, or you make fights piss easy to not frustate people or you make people repeat fights again and again on a slower pace, this is especially agravating on a game that doesn't has an end combat button. Well, at least, the save game system now tracks who died, so you don't have to repeat fights but I really want to know how this is going to work with conversations, triggers and quests objectives resetting upon reload?

 

[Phinx]

Conversations and quest don't reset upon reload, only upon moving between scenes. Which is just as bad really because implementing even a moderate amount of interactable npcs, or keeping track of non key item pick ups between scenes with story triggers is a joke. Also there is a limit to how many story triggers you can use before it takes up the whole screen.

Some triggers however reset upon reload.

I would assume that if it were super easy they wouldn't have so many problems doing it. Whether it's the engine, their tools or whatever else I have no idea, but the idea they could flip an easy switch to have perfect saving but refuse to do so is kind of retarded.

In any event I didn't mind the saving in the original version at all. I don't save scum in turn-based games.

It may not seem like such a bad thing, but underneath the hood it limits the possibilities in what we will see in the game from UGC creators and Harebrained Schemes themselves. The way Harebrained Schemes had to build Dead Man's Switch is they made a copy of the Seamstress Union, with all new dialogue and npc's instead of using the original scene with progression because of the way the save system and triggers works. So after you finished a mission and revisited the Seamstress you were actually visiting a copy of the Seamstress with new changes each time.

They weren't able to reuse the original as everything resets upon leaving each scene (everytime you see a loading screen) and thus unless you use a ton of story triggers between scenes you'll be stuck with no real way of implementing C&C, item pick-ups and any form of progression between scenes.

You can't even make a major Seattle City and Berlin city UGC where you travel back and forth between the two because everything will reset each time you leave the cities.

 

[Roguey]

But there was reactivity in one scene because of a choice you made in a previous scene in a few places.

 

[veryalien]

I would assume that if it were super easy they wouldn't have so many problems doing it. Whether it's the engine, their tools or whatever else I have no idea, but the idea they could flip an easy switch to have perfect saving but refuse to do so is kind of retarded.

In any event I didn't mind the saving in the original version at all. I don't save scum in turn-based games.

Incompetence comes to mind. Why is it retarded to think their engineering department should be fired?

 

[DeepOcean]

Conversations and quest don't reset upon reload, only upon moving between scenes.

So, this save system won't solve the major problem of Shadowrun Returns editor, making a non-linear UGC is a big pain in the ass. The only way to keep things manageable is if you want to make a city, you are forced to keep quests isolated in their own areas, stopping the player to return to earliear areas until the missions are finished and the areas you visit a lot pratically unchanged.

 

[almondblight]

It may not seem like such a bad thing, but underneath the hood it limits the possibilities in what we will see in the game from UGC creators and Harebrained Schemes themselves. The way Harebrained Schemes had to build Dead Man's Switch is they made a copy of the Seamstress Union, with all new dialogue and npc's instead of using the original scene with progression because of the way the save system and triggers works. So after you finished a mission and revisited the Seamstress you were actually visiting a copy of the Seamstress with new changes each time.

Yeah, the reason why you couldn't just walk back and forth through doors in the game (Going to walk out the morgue's front door? You'll never be able to walk back in. Going to step into the Seamstress Union? You won't be able to step out.), and why the game was so painfully linear. That's probably why they shoved all the shops into the bottom of the Seamstress Union, so they wouldn't have to bother with you going anywhere else. Given how much it hurt the game, the save system really was an impressive act of incompetence.

 

[Infinitron]

Hmmm. Couldn't you, in theory, have a system that actually works via multiple saved games, one for each area? Each time you left an area, that area's saved game would be saved, and when you returned to it, it would be loaded, restoring the area's previous state. The saves would have to be "topped off"/updated on the fly with global data (character stats, inventory, multi-location quest flags, etc), of course.

 

[DeepOcean]

Hmmm. Couldn't you, in theory, have a system that actually works via multiple saved games, one for each area? Each time you left an area, that area's saved game would be saved, and when you returned to it, it would be loaded, restoring the area's previous state. The saves would have to be "topped off"/updated on the fly with global data (character stats, inventory, multi-location quest flags, etc), of course.

You are assuming that Harebrained schemes has intelligence and talent but based on the big demonstrations of incompetence we had, I'm really not sure.

 

[ghostdog]

It really is astonishing how they managed to gimp the whole game because they couldn't correctly implement a simple save system.

 

[veryalien]

It really is astonishing how they managed to gimp the whole game because they couldn't correctly implement a simple save system.

One explanation is that their engineers worked on mobile titles in the past, and are inexperienced on the PC platform at this scale. But yeah. They could shell out 5-10k to a games programmer on contract and have this solved within a month if stopped and really thought about it.

 

[Zetor]

After a short time of testing through the editor here is what I have found so far.
- new quicksaves implemented.
- in the current scene if you save after someone has died they stay dead when you load the game. Although everything still respawns upon exiting and re-entering a scene. Same with quests/conversations which will stay the same upon reload but changing scenes will reset everything unless story triggers are used.
- reloading still triggers at map start triggers, so if you have a spawn point set from map start or another trigger then that is where you will spawn. Basically you will not spawn at the exact location where you last saved the game, but instead you will spawn where you set your player spawner upon map start.
- noticed quite a few bugs that are new in my UGC that worked fine pre-patch and for some reason F1 no longer brings up debug, making it a major pain in the backside to fix the bugs. So my early impressions in codex terms is decline.

Sad face. Guess I'm never going to finish my module -- screw trying to do a non-linear investigation sequence with eleventy billion global variables and triggers.

Thanks for the testing, though!

 

[Phinx]

Conversations and quest don't reset upon reload, only upon moving between scenes.

So, this save system won't solve the major problem of Shadowrun Returns editor, making a non-linear UGC is a big pain in the ass. The only way to keep things manageable is if you want to make a city, you are forced to keep quests isolated in their own areas, stopping the player to return to earliear areas until the missions are finished and the areas you visit a lot pratically unchanged.

Correct, it sadly won't help solve the problem. Zero persistence.

Hmmm. Couldn't you, in theory, have a system that actually works via multiple saved games, one for each area? Each time you left an area, that area's saved game would be saved, and when you returned to it, it would be loaded, restoring the area's previous state. The saves would have to be "topped off"/updated on the fly with global data (character stats, inventory, multi-location quest flags, etc), of course.

That's actually a very interesting idea Infinitron.

Haha Zetor I just posted on your thread in the Shadowrun forums with Infinitron's suggestion. Yeah I'm done with my UGC aswell sadly.

 

[DalekFlay]

You can't even make a major Seattle City and Berlin city UGC where you travel back and forth between the two because everything will reset each time you leave the cities.

I don't think the tools or the game were built to be that at all, saving system being what it is or not. I spent a few hours with the editor before realizing all I could make was X-Com and decided not to do so.