Portable savefiles

[ojii]

Hi everyone

One thing that is annoying about posting savefiles are the paksets+addons.

Wouldn't it be nicer if the pakset selected would just be embedded in the savefile? Like that we could post savefiles and everyone could open them.

Would make posting competitions/screenshots+savegames a lot nicer

[Václav]

ojii, of course that it would be very interesting - but can you image what memory it would consume (mostly if somebody uses great many addons)?

[ojii]

With memory I assume you mean diskspace? Well I never really think about that because it's dirt cheap.

Anyway if that's a problem, there should be an option (either "save portable" from the UI or a little command line tool).

[Václav]

Yes, I think diskspace.

Currently my last game has about 8 MBytes
Folder of basic graphics has about 74 MBytes
Folder of addon graphics has about 161 MBytes

-->
Total diskspace would be 243 MBytes - it is quite much - even for most fileshare webs.

And now try to ïmagine that somebody has often more than one savegame. So, it gives Gigabytes of diskspace.

[ojii]

Alright, I see your point. So how about the additional option as described above?

EDIT: How big are those if they're compressed?

[VS]

If these were not called "saves" but "exports" or whatever, it might work at least psychologically. On the other hand... on Windows, the extra two MB for executable make it feasible to simply share the save with your whole installation and addons, if you need portability that much.

Paksets compress relatively poorly, IIRC to some 70% which does not help that much.

[Carl]

If these were not called "saves" but "exports" or whatever, it might work at least psychologically. On the other hand... on Windows, the extra two MB for executable make it feasible to simply share the save with your whole installation and addons, if you need portability that much.

It's a shame that one can't simply share a single folder and thereby share the game and the savefiles -- since savegames will locate themselves in \User\Documents\Simutrans\Save ...

Well, I suppose I could just locate my program directory at \User\Documents\Simutrans. Hmm. Why had I never thought of that before?

[ojii]

If these were not called "saves" but "exports" or whatever, it might work at least psychologically. On the other hand... on Windows, the extra two MB for executable make it feasible to simply share the save with your whole installation and addons, if you need portability that much.

Paksets compress relatively poorly, IIRC to some 70% which does not help that much.

Perfectly fine with the name "export". I would just love something **easy** to share savegames...