Adding local character saving

[mintyphresh]

Cloud saves put some kind of load on the server, and I'm pretty sure the 5 server-specific saves do too. What if there was a way to store as many characters as you wanted, by saving them locally to your personal computer? Would such a thing be feasible?

[kyle2143]

Why do you think that cloud saves put a lot of load on the server? I don't think I've heard that, but then I've been out of the loop. I don't see how they would unless something has gone horribly wrong somewhere.

[mintyphresh]

I assumed there was some reason why there was a limit to them. Or a supposed limit. I've never hit it.

[Glamurio]

Cloud saves put some kind of load on the server, and I'm pretty sure the 5 server-specific saves do too. What if there was a way to store as many characters as you wanted, by saving them locally to your personal computer? Would such a thing be feasible?

Yes, very feasible. In fact, according to my short conversation with pali, fairly easy too. I was looking into it, but I'm not that skilled at TGUI hackery yet, so I didn't make much progress. I would very much like that as well.

That being said, however, someone did voice a concern about people being able to edit the save files (since they are now local) and allow you to do things you might otherwise not be able to do, such as arbitrary hex values for skin color (which is locked behind a medal), but potentially more.

[Piesuu]

Given the fact the only way you could legitimately edit those saves would be while playing on the server, there could just be a checksum that gets saved to the server, a quick conversion of all the save data. When the player wants to load in a local save, the server simply grabs another checksum from the file and compares it to a previously saved one. It's simplified here but I would assume it wouldn't be too hard to implement, it's still saving some data but it is much less than if it was all cloud based.

[valtsu0]

Given the fact the only way you could legitimately edit those saves would be while playing on the server, there could just be a checksum that gets saved to the server, a quick conversion of all the save data. When the player wants to load in a local save, the server simply grabs another checksum from the file and compares it to a previously saved one. It's simplified here but I would assume it wouldn't be too hard to implement, it's still saving some data but it is much less than if it was all cloud based.

IMO this would kind of defeat the whole point. The best solution would be to have the server verify that the character is legal. Would be some work, but it should bemostly just copy-pasting?

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This is one of those things that have been suggested many times and people have always agreed it is a good idea, but no-one has bothered to make reality.

[Glamurio]

This is one of those things that have been suggested many times and people have always agreed it is a good idea, but no-one has bothered to make reality.

That's because the server-side validation part is most definitely developer-only territory, and those are all working on their own much more demanding projects, I'm guessing. A contributor could implement the local saving part, but any validation would have to be done by a dev.