Savegames as save points are wrong?

[necros]

[mh]

Ah, OK.

Tried it, didn't work.

Building the in-memory snapshot takes time - 25 ms for e3m7, for example. String concatenation in C is slow as hell - you'd need to build a pascal string interface to avoid having to scan over the entire buffer to find where it ends every time you want to add even a single char to it. Might test that sometime.

[qbism]

What's the performance hit of demo recording? Restore games from a demo. To load a savegame, engine would load demo and fast-forward in memory to a savepoint (or to the end of the demo). Save files would be "huge" in 1996 terms but so what. Optionally show it on-screen so player could jump in anywhere on the timeline. Not to derail into a discussion of an improved demo format, just daydreaming...

[mh]

I've no idea, but that sounds awesome.

[hogsy]

The performance hit from recording a demo seems pretty minimal from what I've seen.

[Spike]

you would think otherwise if you have a half-broken disk drive that caused the machine to totally lock up for the duration of any read or write.
on any modern system, its pointless to make system calls for any data less than 4k. personally I'd aim for at least 64k.
fwrite is meant to have a certain level of buffering anyway, though I guess its buffer is conservative and only really there to cover really inefficient single-byte access.

[Arkage]

The demo save system sounds pretty cool.

Would make for a nice game mechanic, having the ability to rewind time and correct your mistakes.

[Baker]

[frag.machine]