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Initially, saving was an expensive operation. So games with auto save tended to be either games that specifically were built around it (e.g. Starflight and its self modifying code) or were on mainframes, where the expense wasn't an issue (e.g. Rogue). Come the mid 90s on the PC you potentially could have implemented auto save, but at this point there was wide industry convention for manual saves. Auto save ended up being limited to level-based games sometimes giving you the "as you enter the level" auto save. The modern form of auto save that is context sensitive required rethinking games; a mixture of auto save friendly level design and concepts of combat transitions.

MrPopo wrote:Initially, saving was an expensive operation. So games with auto save tended to be either games that specifically were built around it (e.g. Starflight and its self modifying code) or were on mainframes, where the expense wasn't an issue (e.g. Rogue). Come the mid 90s on the PC you potentially could have implemented auto save, but at this point there was wide industry convention for manual saves. Auto save ended up being limited to level-based games sometimes giving you the "as you enter the level" auto save. The modern form of auto save that is context sensitive required rethinking games; a mixture of auto save friendly level design and concepts of combat transitions.

It's interesting how design in games used to be focused on the lack of saving ability, like shorter games or the use of save codes and what not. My mom had a notebook full of save codes for a DOS game she used to love playing.
Some games nowadays are not only reliant on auto-saves, but sometimes even use them aggressivley to stop the player from cheesing certain stuff. Like how dark souls auto-saves all the time so you can't alt+f4 to cancel dying or something.

marurun wrote:Auto save existed as early as the late 80s, but wasn’t necessarily commonplace then.

I didnt know that, It should have been seemed logical. I remember my teacher in the 90s saying "breathe in, breathe out, save" otherwise all your work would be gone. Imagine writing a full essay then it magically disappears! Such pain.

MrPopo wrote:Initially, saving was an expensive operation. So games with auto save tended to be either games that specifically were built around it (e.g. Starflight and its self modifying code) or were on mainframes, where the expense wasn't an issue (e.g. Rogue). Come the mid 90s on the PC you potentially could have implemented auto save, but at this point there was wide industry convention for manual saves. Auto save ended up being limited to level-based games sometimes giving you the "as you enter the level" auto save. The modern form of auto save that is context sensitive required rethinking games; a mixture of auto save friendly level design and concepts of combat transitions.

Well I meant saving on computer software like MS Office and Photoshop but thanks for the input on game saves. I think game saves should be built around the game play. Some might benefit from save any where, some might benefit from saving points, and so on. I personally am a fan of save any where like DOOM.
What do you mean saving was an expensive operation?

Chk991 wrote:It's interesting how design in games used to be focused on the lack of saving ability, like shorter games or the use of save codes and what not..

Back then games were not plenty, and when you bought a game you played it to death. The idea is to play it until you master it and "beat" it without saving. This way you get "your money's worth" of $60. Sounds reasonable given that with saves you might finish it in 3 hours or so. Personally I found it frustrating I never finished a game like that specially the platformers. I wonder if any one did complete platformers in few days of purchasing. Its so annoying to reach the final boss, die, now you have to go through the whole game again to attempt 1 more time. Even worse you had to do it multiple times until you figure out the pattern of the boss, and maybe a "final form".

One of the annoying things back then was being stuck, no internet to tell you what to do. Better buy the guide for that 1 piece of info.

What I mean by "saving was expensive" is twofold. The first is that storage was expensive, so your system randomly writing data to your storage devices was a bad idea. The second is that storage was slow, so devoting time to writing to storage was not something you wanted to inflict on the user without their consent.

MrPopo wrote:What I mean by "saving was expensive" is twofold. The first is that storage was expensive, so your system randomly writing data to your storage devices was a bad idea. The second is that storage was slow, so devoting time to writing to storage was not something you wanted to inflict on the user without their consent.

Another factor is wear and tear on your save medium. And the drive itself. Autosave in office applications caused the early death of many usb flash drives about twenty years ago. People resented that.

Yeah, that wasn't helped by the terrible write management algorithms at the time that didn't spread the writes out over all the locations on the media for even wear.

Limewater wrote:Another factor is wear and tear on your save medium. And the drive itself. Autosave in office applications caused the early death of many usb flash drives about twenty years ago. People resented that.

how come it doesn't do that any more? it might hurt flash drives but most of them where on HDD

Audio books should come with a pdf version too.

I was browsing a torrent site and stumbled upon this, which I found to be pretty hilarious

^porn alert Lol!