The crashes are unbearable, please make an autosave feature
3absh
Member Posts: 601
This is for the GameSalad developer team,
Guys I really do like your software, but sometimes it becomes so irritating I want to throw my desktop in the trash can.
I mean I just saw an autosave "draft" while writing this message on your site. How difficult is it to create an autosave function more importantly on your software instead of working for 3 hours and losing everything with a single stupid crash.
I don't want to spend 50% more time on a project that already requires a lot of time.
Please fix the bugs in your software by letting users send the crash reports to you when they happen, and in the next update please include a draft folder for recovery in case the software crashes.
I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this one.
Comments
They will get to the auto save. AFTER they fix the constant crash issues. Then the autosave feature wont be as heavily needed as it is now. Kind of a catch22
When I used the Windows creator I ran "Auto Key Clicker." This program automatically types a key depending on the interval you set. Make the program hit "CTRL+S" every 5 minutes or so. Worked for me. http://sourceforge.net/projects/autokeyclicker/
@abuabed84 I'm getting really annoyed as well by all the random crashes. If it's not coming early this week, I will probably go back to the previous stable release-.-
There really should be no reason to ever lose a file, all you need is to ensure you regularly save-as, and make incremental versions as you work, I've worked like this for years, and not just with GameSalad, and cannot honestly remember the last time I lost a project (maybe 10 years ago?), I've never lost a GameSalad project.
I absolutely hate the idea of autosave, perhaps it's a personal thing, we all work in different ways, and it would depend - of course - on how it works.
I'm not losing the entire project, I do save incrementally everyday, but I lose at times a 1 hour session's work that really gets on my nerves.
Gamesalad does have a lot of promise but if the crashes persist then it doesn't matter how easy and well laid out the software is, people will eventually look for another program.
You can't hate autosave if it happens lightly without you noticing in a separate draft folder, and Gamesalad can give the user an option if he wants autosave or not and how frequent it occurs.
A simple system should do it.
An auto-save trigger boolean , you can choose activate or not.Also set the save from 1 to 20 min?
Than you could click right button on GS icon , show content and a new folder would be there, named AUTOSAVE. Files would have project name +date in the name.
Dont know if that is easy to achieve, just an idea
I agree, I usually save when I feel it needs to be saved, especially in gamesalad. When you make some changes and give it a preview, you can't restore the changes, which I find very annoying. So I usually save when everything works the way I want to. Then, when everything goes wrong, I just reload the project. The random crashes from the current stable build are really annoying though, sometimes it doesn't crash for hours, sometimes it's crashing 3 times in one minute.
@Socks
So what you are saying is that autosave is a complete waste of time and that everyone should be as good as you are at remembering every 5 minutes to make a save as +1 file. Youre saying you have never gotten tunnel visioned on getting some coding and rules and behaviors set and never cussed your self out for forgetting to save. While viewing this issue on a global GS creator user scale. Youre saying that autosave wouldnt save a large amount of developer time? Granted we could just do what we normally do. Take it upon ourselves as GS users and create a "WORK AROUND". Hell just go to walmart and by a egg timer and set it every 5 minutes. Socks is buying.
And if they were smart enough to implement it into GS creator. Im sure they are smart enough to implement a check box for those who want it and those who do not. Sometimes its not that you have the feature or not. Sometimes its just right to have the choice/option to choose.
I'm talking about saving in a draft file separate from the original file. You could always return to your last saved file. But there should be a draft file in case of a crash, battery drained out or electricity went off. As in the case with Microsoft Office and others.
An auto save can be good and can be bad. It will be bad because sometimes I try to do something new in my game and it doesn't work and makes my game crash, all I have to do is close and open the program again and it is back to normall.
@FINNBOGG He said it's a personal thing, why getting angry out of the blue?
I personally wouldn't like auto-save as a default, i like to have control as to when i save my project. But the option to have auto save would be nice.
Fortuna Infortuna Forti Una
I can imagine it must be pretty annoying to lose any work at all and I can see how it would get on your nerves. Generally when working I will Save-As when I make any kind of adjustment I'm happy with, so even something as trivial as changing a spawner from every 1.5 seconds to every 1.2 seconds - and if I think to myself it's made an improvement / looks better - I will Save-As (and increment the file number) and carry on, so often I'm saving every few minutes, it's become second nature so I barely notice I'm doing it - shift+command+S - hit the right arrow - hit delete - increment the number - enter, it's all over in 2 seconds, a worthwhile investment ! Like I say, this is not just with GameSalad, I work like this with all software, so after a few hours of work I have a folder going from XXX001 to XXX112 (or something like that).
I actually think the layout is far from ideal in GameSalad, it's the one thing I always complain about and, for me at least, really slows down production (no zoom, no cut and paste, no multiple select, no guides or snap to grid, no folders for assets, the need to constantly navigate between windows, pointlessly small expression windows . . . etc)
Agreed, if it worked invisibly and had no impact on your current saved file - but I just hate the idea of my work being modified automatically - I imagine a terrible implementation where your working file it written over every 5 minutes !
Even if you are just playing around with your file, changing a bunch of values with no intention of keeping them, just to see what changing various stuff does, only to find out that your actual file has been written over with all these experiments ! Hopefully it wouldn't be anything like that, but then again the image asset filing system is pretty much like that, which has caused many problems for people. Like I say it's just a personal preference, but I'd rather have full control over every aspect of the process.
I fully support an auto-save feature, as long as it can be turned off and as long as the interval can be defined. I would drool over an autosave feature that provided even super-basic versioning such as naming each save differently.
Even though I made SaveSalad, I don't always use it. I am sometimes working on a project that I'm experimenting a lot in, and may make difficult to reverse changes that I don't want to save. I'd either save as a new project or roll directly back to the last version I was happy with.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
Agreed, ideally you could make a change, do a preview, think to yourself 'that looks worse', back out of the preview and hit Undo/Cmd+Z.
Same here, I habitually save with every single progression, even minor stuff.
I guess I simply must have been lucky in this regard, I've heard all the stories of GS crashing and of lost work, of a frustratingly slow and unresponsive interface - I mean really unresponsive, horror stories of 3 minutes to back out of an actor's behaviours !! - but luckily I've managed to remain absolutely 100% free of all these issues, never had any of them, I honestly can't remember the last GameSalad crash I had (but I'm guessing like most software I must have had a crash o two in the past couple of months) . . . but I do try and stay behind the curve, always an OS (OSX) behind the current version and a version or two behind on GameSalad (I'm still using 12.10) . . . I see people say stuff like "Hey, did anyone see the Apple Expo this afternoon, they announced the new OS, it's called Watermelon, there's a beta for registered developers, freaking cool huh !!!??" . . . . three quarters of an hour later . . . "Hey guys, running Watermelon, but now my Flappy Bird clone is all screwed up, do you think it's a bug in GameSalad ?"
Has a very quick look at the thread . . . notices that he'd said nothing of the sort . . . remembers that straw man arguments are, for some, a popular way of navigating online discussion . . . realises that quoting the post you are responding to usually prevents the respondent from wondering down an epistemological cul-de-sac as their review of what has been said can be seen to be at odds with what was actually said . . . moves on to the next question.
Not as far as I'm aware, I've left the house without having first had a couple of large Pinot Noirs on a winter's day on more than one occasion, something I always regret, but I can't remember ever having forgotten to save the project I'm working on. But even if I had forgotten to save a project - perhpas I was struggling with a cork - would that invalidate the recommendation ?
Has a very quick look at the thread . . . notices that he'd made no comment on '[saving] a large amount of developer time' either for or against the idea . . . remembers that when people start sentences with phrases like 'so you're saying' rather than quoting what you've actually said, it will generally be followed by something you haven't said . . . moves on to the next question.
Ahhhhhhh !!! Capitals !!!! The Internet !!!!!
Has a very quick look at the thread . . notices no one else has attempted to introduce a personal element to the discussion . . . moves on to the next question (note to self: egg timer = good idea).
Yes, agreed, ideally it would be a preference you could set . . . . but . . . GameSalad has never offered preference settings for anything, absolutely anything, never ! (I must have spent - collectively - weeks changing the default project size from iPhone to iPad on thousand of projects, something that is normally dealt with through preference settings) - so I don't imagine (and it really is just a guess) that they would decide to introduce a preferences structure now, but who knows maybe you are right, but we could make the same argument for the introduction of preferences for any new feature, as yet none have come with preferences (and many things would benefit from being set by preferences - default text colour, default text size, default project type, default actor size, default actor colour, etc etc) - but yes, in an ideal world it should be a preference which you can tailor to your own working method/environment (if an auto-save feature even ever happens).
Agreed, like @FINNBOGG says, the ideal compromise would be the ability to switch on (and off) any autosave feature.
The ideal compromise is to eliminate the crashes. Yeah?
@CodeWizard
So Sir... if you made it your number 1 goal tomorrow to either. Implement a autosave feature.. or... eliminate the issues that cause random crashes. Which goal do you think you could implement first?
Since random crashes have been a issue since day 1 of GS Creator. I feel it would be safer to say, that implementing a autosave would be faster.
@Socks
Yes Sir i use all caps with quotation marks, every time i mention the phrase "WORK AROUND". The reason being since day 1. If a issue that needed to be fixed by the staff, had a "WORKAROUND" some user invented. Then that "WORKAROUND" simply made that issue go to the bottom on the barrel. And no I wasnt angry at your opinion on the subject of autosave.
And also free pizza.
Agreed, but it seems like a reasonable approach to me, if you have 10 issues troubling GS users, and 6 of them can be addressed with WORKAROUNDS (
) then it makes sense to focus on the other 4 issues that have no WORKAROUNDS, seems like basic triage to me ? And this is all assuming that the idea that a WORKAROUND pushes that problem down the list is true (sounds like a reasonable idea to me).
"And no" sounds as if you are responding to a question or claim I've made about your anger ? Yet I've made no such claim, I've never even mentioned 'anger' or anything similar, I have no clue about your emotional state, and no way of knowing what it is, in fact it's not even crossed my mind, seriously, never.
@CodeWizard to reduce the crashes could only be priority 2. A Pc, Mac or whatelse may fail due to many reasons, e.g. such as Power outage in your street or other software puts the computer down, ....
An autosave reduces the consequences of any failure.
I have been fixing crash bugs all last week that are a ton of crash fixes in the latest RC build and we are looking towards releasing that build any day now. Thank you for your continued patience while we address these issues.
I used the release candidate yesterday briefly for about 10 minutes and it didn't crash and it didn't seem to slow down drastically. This often happened every 5 minutes in the last version I had installed 13.7 so it looks like the next public version will be a little more stable. I did only use it for about 10 minutes though
Even if you fix 99% of the crashes. It would still be a viable option to have autosave.
Guys come on , it's not that bad. I don't know why anyone would go hours without saving . You should know a crash is coming at some point. same with most programs. Neither have I ever lost a project. Just save. And anyways, the crashes aren't even that bad, it takes 5 seconds to restart the program.
There is another option, many 3rd party software packages for auto saving exist. You could also feasibly write a small app on your own for that purpose.
I personally would not want to use auto save, even with the crashing that occurs. This sort of thing happens in even the best software from time to time (Photoshop has crashed on me on several occasions), just make sure to save often. A good habit to have no matter the software when working on important things.
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One feature we've discussed internally a bit is to have Creator automatically save whenever you preview. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that!
Would it be writing over your working file (or generating some other secondary file) ?
For example if I start a new project, call it 'GameProject1' and save it to my desktop, would the idea be that this file would be overwritten (when you preview) or would some other 'back-up' file be generated ?
You often preview dozens of times during the creation process, to check/test something out, to see if it's working or not, even for a single element, and (for me at least) there are many many more abandoned tests as there are successful tests - for example I'll have an expression that needs to do a certain thing so will constantly be adjusting and testing this expression, trying different ideas, rearranging the calculation and changing the values to eventually end up with what I need, the overwhelming majority of the previews for this process will, by definition, be producing the wrong result.
Considering that I've had projects become corrupted on several occasions and considering it has happened during saving also (have had GS crash on save also and in a previous version during preview in the creator also) any form of "auto save" is a pretty terrible thought.
I want to be in control of saving myself and I always save a copy of my project after working for like 30-60 min, that way if a project becomes corrupted (which every long time GS user is likely to have experienced) then I can just load an older copy thus losing minimal production time.
Statistically project corruption happens rarely but once is enough to destroy a project. It is also something that I have never been able to reproduce in any controlled way.