;'D
consider posting the relevant pieces of your code.
also i found hard to understand what you were describing.
i don’t think saving a render target is a good idea. it will get overwritten.
the only way to save an image persistently would be with either a buffer (which i would avoid but you could), or a png.
the engine already has functionality to take screenshots and save them to png (you can search in this forum), i would also use that, output to a path.
for the path i would have an integer that counts how many screenshots where taken and adds that as a postfix to the path.
then in the savefile save object i would store the path.
then add some logic to load from a png from disk.
also protip, once you delete a savefile make sure to delete the pngs.
the engine also has functionality to deal with files and filesystem.
*tamper
yes it would allow the player to modify or mess with the files.
but imho that’s not something you should really try to control.
as long as you put the files in a folder relative to your game the user should not break them by accident.
i would, at any case, add logic to deal with a missing file. to make your game more resilient to any disk accident.
the engine provides a way to obtain a folder for the “saved” stuff, including configs and savegames.
saving to that folder would make it so that steam could persist those images to the cloud too.
trying to control the user doesn’t seem like a useful thing to me. and as i user i don’t like those practices. if someone wants to mess with the game they will do it anyway. it seems like a waste of energy to me.