Developing a game right now and pretty frustrated with trying to find knowledge on doing a “save anywhere” system like the old games (Doom, Build engine, old Unreal Engine games etc) or perhaps the Bethesda RPGs (Elder Scrolls, Fallouts etc) and after a lot of Googling, I stumbled upon this page:
Seems someone has already figured it out; I’m more of an artist/creative person and I really would like to cut down on programming time whenever possible and focus on making a game.
However it seems that there are no links on that site and it doesn’t seem to exist on the Marketplace… so where can I actually get this plugin? Thanks!
EDIT:
[Answer] You have to e-mail Rama or PM him to purchase this plugin.
[Why does it feel like I am seeking some kind of secret arcane black magic on what was essentially built right into the engine in previous iterations… :S]
Nah that forum is empty. Already checked even before I made this thread. As a matter of fact, already spent close to 5 days reading up on the subject and the result was that it’s just too frustrating for me and I prefer to use something that someone else has already made.
The fact that this thread has 72 views but no clear answer seems to say something about how the engine is making a basic feature over complicated…
That is not necessarily the case, each game has different specifics on how saves should be handled, so my guess is Epic has decided to leave that up to the developer to decide on what data should be saved, there is a save system in place in Blueprints for basic saving/loading of data, but anything more complex than that needs to be handled by you. Your examples above of a save anywhere system is quite complex, especially Gamebryo games, they store a lot of data, in a very specific way. This is not something that could be generically handled with ease.
I understand serialization is no simple business… from what I’ve gathered, to do a “save anywhere” you have to iterate upon every one of your actor classes that you intend to be save-able and loadable with a for loop, store their relevant variables in arrays and all that good stuff… is that really the only way? Sounds really tedious and I imagine with Blueprints it will just make things even way more complicated.
Also, I can’t seem to see if there is a way to save an AI state, and the current frame of animation the actor was in… and lastly a particle’s trajectory. Or perhaps I’m just not looking hard enough?
Thats pretty much how I do it, each actor is responsible for saving its own state, it saves all information relevant to that actor type. I can’t really help with the other questions as I have custom AI, Animation, and particles, in which I am able to save all the above information quite easily (Altho for particles, I only really save the particle system age)
@Rama Would it work on player and AI with inventory and storage? Do you have a discord? Can you do a integration video with this system and Survival Game kit?