How saving and loading will work once infinite is in.
This is all for single player, but it’s mean to work somewhat analogous to how multiplayer works:
Title menu:
When you start the game, you get the splash screen and a few choices. For the downloaded version of the game, this will include the ability to join multiplayer games. In both versions you can choose to edit your options or play the game in singleplayer.
SELECT WORLD:
Egg country (200 MB) [Copy] [Delete]
Sinisterville (5 MB) [Copy] [Delete]
Exploring the world (4.7 GB) [Copy] [Delete]
[ CREATE NEW WORLD] [ IMPORT LEVEL ]
New world:
When you create a new world, you’ll get to pick the name (can be changed later on, will have a random default value), world size (up to a maximum of eight times the surface area of the earth), and a starting position from a minimap outlining the entire world. This map will include different climates and terrain types, like islands, inland, forests, floating (along the edges of the map) and so. Different areas of the map will also have different difficulty, but I’m not entirely sure how to represent that.
Playing the game:
There’s no saving and no loading! Changes you make are immediately written to disk, and when you die, you die, and can respawn in the starting location, just like in multiplayer. If you want to, you can make a copy of the world at any time, but this might take a while if the world save is large.
You will be able to change your starting position, probably by moving some flag item or similar.
Importing a level:
At first, this will just be for loading saves from old versions of the game, but it might be expanded to support saves from other games, mostly because I love pointless features like that. I already have mostly working DOOM level importer written, and it’d be really interesting to be able to load Dwarf Fortress levels, if Toady One would be OK with that.
When importing a level, it’ll set up a new world save automatically.
Later on, this feature will allow you to play levels made by others without saving it to disk. This is so you can make a nice puzzle level and easily share it with other players without having them waste HD space. There will be some easy url scheme for sharing levels online as well so you can just send a link to your saved level, and the game will start up and load your level automatically.
Notes and comments:
This will make single player and multiplayer much more similar, which is good.
Per request, there will be an option for “hardcore mode”, which will delete the entire world save when you die, and disable copying the world.
How will I deal with changes to the level generator? If you’ve explored an area using one version of the level generator, then it gets updated, there’d be a pretty ugly visible border between the two areas, and I _really_ don’t want to keep all old generators included in every version of the game.
