#2, by afrlmeWednesday, 15. July 2015, 23:28 10 years ago
A'llo.
1. yes they are two different systems entirely.
The default save system requires a menu scene & you have to define the save slots for saving & loading the save games. When you save a game it will automatically create a thumbnail (& date/time underneath if you enabled in scene properties by assigning a font for it) in the first available empty slot. It does not necessarily create the save in the slot you selected as it will always default to the first empty slot unless a save exists already in the slot you selected, then it will overwrite the save in that slot.
The autosave / quicksave system is more of a silent save system that is used in the background. You can load / execute a quicksave / autosave from pretty much any scene, although it is advised to only create them on actual scenes instead of menu scenes. The autosave / quicksave feature is actually what you will end up using to create your resume / continue & new game options. To truly start a new game, you need to reset all conditions, values, positions & states back to their default values - what better way to do that than creating a dedicated quicksave the first time the player presses the new game button?
2. You don't have to quit anything. The players should be saved in the location that they were in, however I don't think it will save their current animation frame position / action. Your at begin of scene actions will usually take care of setting most of your scene stuff going again or calling actions or functions or loops that you might need for the scene.
In general the save files contain a list of values such as the values of all conditions & values, the positions of all characters, positions of various other things & so on. The engine reads this data while loading a save file & updates the relevant tables / fields accordingly.
3. You've answered your own question here. Technically with a bit of time, patience & effort you could actually make a save style system similar to Tell Tell Games The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among us using the autosave system, some time stamps, if queries & some pre-images / animations & a bit of parallax scrolling or manual movement of the image / animation positions - fun.
4. Only if you use the autosave method & are willing to use Lua script to read / write to an external txt file in which you can save the name to & retrieve the name from as VS won't remember those names by default until you load a save file that contained those names. So the only way to do that is externally then you create a small loop (with jump to x action part) & pause action part & a display object or narration text in which we use a value that we wrote the name from the text file to, in order to display the name on the screen where we want it. It's a lot less complicated than it sounds. Just hard to explain with text.
5. Yes you can add scene objects containing an image sprite or an animation over the top of the save slots (since 4.x) however if you want to place something below it then you will have to add it to the background image itself or make sure you crop / edit it so that it doesn't overlay the save thumbnails themselves. There is no z-index ordering in menu scenes, so you have save slots (thumbnails) at -1 & the scene objects at 0 I think.
Finally, I would like to provide a quick, but important tip. Do not load from save files during the development of your game. Only load from save files created in the current play session, when testing your game. In other words during development create some delete autosave action parts in the launch game actions to delete the autosaves you are using for your new game & resume / continue game options. The reason for this is that when you update your project by adding, removing or editing something that might get stored in the save files & then try loading a save file from how ever long ago, you might end up with various bugs while running your game because you've tried to load data that might no longer be there, or is lacking new data.
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