I’ve made a little thing to allow the Fast Forward of logs w/ option to append to them, if anyone wants to try it out. It’s the “LoadLogForAppend” on Builds of vassalengine/vassal and the two new options are on the Tools menu. I often want to keep appending to the same log (starting from the original board state) rather than only make successive logs.
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Seems like this will be a good alternative to lots of logfiles for PBEM where cloud storage is used and perhaps recovery during online games.
My first test went as follows:-
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Opened a log file normally from the wizard (Load Game)
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Opened using Tools… option as shown:
That asked me if I wanted to save the existing game; answered no and the new file opened correctly:
So far so good. -
At this point, I was thinking, can I quickly merge in an existing log file. So tried,
This also gave a prompt to save the existing game; at this point I cancelled and the game was left in a corrupt state (cards moved off decks). I’m guessing maybe the game state was duplicated.
Repeating step (3) but selecting “No” to save game, gave me the valid state at the end of the 2nd log file as expected.
In conclusion,
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Would be nice if cancelling the “Save Game?” prompt gave a more graceful outcome. I suspect this is a more generic issue, as I have seen similar in online games.
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Would a merge/fast-forward option be useful as well?
Mark
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Oh thanks that’s good testing. I actually discovered that the “cancel” button on that dialog shouldn’t really be there (in the sense that it’s WAY too late to cancel by the time we ask you). Really we should be asking you earlier (before we e.g. do all the loading of a game) if you want to save/cancel, but for the moment I’ve removed the cancel because as you discovered it’s a bugfest – and it is indeed as you suggest a more generic issue w/ loading games in general.
How would a “merge/fast-forward” work? I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve there? Glue two existing logfiles together when one happens to pick up from the leave-off point of the other? That can presently be done with Load Continuation although the risks of making a mess are of course high. I’m not sure there’s a way for me to make a merge/fast-forward like that any less “super risky” than what one can presently do?
Brian
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Yes, pretty much. But point taken; people could easily end up glueing two incompatible game states together. Better to see how the new feature goes without the extra potential trouble of load continuation variant.
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Append for me will be a novelty I almost never use, but just the ability to, for example, view a log, get distracted by family, come back to it another day and be able to skip to the end of the log to start logging myself would be nice.
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I see this style of log file handling as my standard and probably only method. So the end result will be one smooth flowing log file from setup to finish.
Sweeeeet!!!
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