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 Auto Save Save When Closing Screen 
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm
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Post Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
I an sorry to say that I don't think that the Auto Save feature in the latest patch is a very good addition.

For example if we are experimenting with a horse in a race to gauge whether it is going to handle the course, distance etc. We could simple save and exit the game and then reload the game, enter the horse. run the race an then close the window and reload the game again prior to entering the horse into that race if we decided the race was the wrong one for the horse.

Although we can save the game before entering the race and reload it, enter the horse and if we decide not to run the hors in that race we can simply open up Task Master (Ctrl-Alt-Delete) and end the S07 game without it auto saving it is an inconvenience and can be easily forgotten.

I am sure quite a few people may disagree with me but this is simply my opinion and thoughts on the subject.


Thu Apr 25, 2019 9:03 am
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Joined: Mon Dec 03, 2018 9:45 am
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
You can still use task manager to close the game without saving


Thu Apr 25, 2019 9:42 am
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Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:15 pm
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
Restarting and repeating the same race day that way is considered cheating. The auto-save will stay as many people have asked for it however as Yasmin says people will probably cheat with task manager anyway so I will introduce a way to stop the auto save for those who must do that in the next patch.


Thu Apr 25, 2019 11:01 am
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
For Mark,

Thank you for your reply regarding the above.

Although I personally don't consider saving a game in order to test the ability of a horse I respect your comment.

I consider that if you were able to use a cheat to make sure the horse wins more of a cheat I am grateful that you will introduce a system whereby Autosave can be deactivated.


Sat Apr 27, 2019 7:41 am
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm
Posts: 17
Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
For Yasmin.

Thank you for your reply it is most appreciated but I did mention the ability to use 'Task Manager' but I inadvertently typed 'Task Master'

My apologies for this.


Sat Apr 27, 2019 7:44 am
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Joined: Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:05 am
Posts: 554
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
The auto save has saved me a few times now.
I have a habit of Alt tabbing out to do something else on the net and it seems that SO7 still accepts some key strokes even when it is minimized.
Also i have had the PDF guide pop up a few times when i alt tab out and the game auto closes.


Sat Apr 27, 2019 12:56 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Apr 19, 2019 11:45 pm
Posts: 84
Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
Definitely an option this game needed, but I would personally recommend making it an option. That way you can basically please nearly everyone. If someone wants to do some testing, then they can turn it off, otherwise it's on.

As a noob, I can't tell you how many times I've quit without realizing I hadn't saved and it's cost me wins which, as a new player, is really devastating and one of those experiences that just might turn off a new user for good (not this one).

So, I'm glad to see it, but would like to see it tweaked.


Sun Apr 28, 2019 5:45 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
For Agrajag,

Thanks for your reply but I did not understand it completely.

Before the 'Autosave' addition in a recent patch we had the option to either click the 'Save and Quit' option which saved the game and returned us to the main menu or simply clicking the red cross on the top right of the screen which shut down the game completely without saving it.

With the new patch if you click either of these options it will autosave the game and return you to either the main menu or close the game completely.

It would be nice to have the option to turn on or off the Autosave on the 'Options' page at the start of the game.


Wed May 01, 2019 6:04 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Mon Aug 01, 2016 2:31 pm
Posts: 4
Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
I've played for a long time just shutting down when I had a bad day at the track. Reload and go into the next day with a little "insight" as to what might happen. Money becomes no object, your stable becomes maxed out, you can purchase any horse you want and you have over $10mil to work with. What's the point? It's like doing a walk through! I love the Auto Save. Winning a race with Max bet feels much better now. Losing one with a boat load on it stings quite a bit. :x as it should. Everything is more difficult now. I just can't seem to get gallops to do anything but jade my horse. So I don't use it. EVER!!!! Love this game, Thanks Guys keep up the good work!


Tue May 07, 2019 4:56 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Apr 19, 2019 11:45 pm
Posts: 84
Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
perseus1947 wrote:
For Agrajag,

Thanks for your reply but I did not understand it completely.


I was simply saying that the game, prior to this update, was in need of an auto-save feature. Losing desired progress due to an errant click is never a good design solution. This prevents that from happening. As one of the newest players, this has saved me personally as I had lost much progress while learning the game and mistakenly hitting the wrong button.

I also dread saying this, but no one is being forced to use this new feature if you want to quit without saving. Read the release log and you'll see that Mark provided a means to quit without saving in the rare cases where this might be useful.


Tue May 07, 2019 5:54 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
For Mark

Quote:
I will introduce a way to stop the auto save for those who must do that in the next patch


Have I missed something Mark?

On 25 Apr you said you were going to issue a modification allowing the 'Autosave' function to be switched off for those who wanted to do this.

This, as has already been mentioned should please everyone, those who want the game to save automatically always and those who want the option to turn this function off.


There have been several patches issued since your post but so far I have not seen one that gives the player the option to switch the autosave off.


Every time I am notified that a patch is available I have downloaded it and installed it into SO7 but I still have not seen the option to turn off and on the autosave.

Can you please advise.

Thank you.


Fri May 24, 2019 9:09 am
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Joined: Mon Dec 03, 2018 9:45 am
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
When you want to close the game without saving on windowed mode hold the left shift button and at the same time press the ‘x’ to close the game.

Yasmin


Fri May 24, 2019 10:42 am
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm
Posts: 17
Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
For Yasmin,

Thanks ever so for that info.

I seem to recall that I may have seen that in one of the patches I installed when the patch was installed and the information of what it contained was given but I possibly did not understand it.

My apologies to Mark for this.


Fri May 24, 2019 1:24 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Sat Jul 12, 2014 3:23 am
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Location: Philadelphia, PA
Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
When the Auto-Save was added to closing the window I literally wrote two .bat files that auto-killed SO7 without allowing it to save, and a second one that both kills and then automatically restarts SO7. Even though Mark has added the ability back to make the game not auto-save, I still use them because I'd regularly forget after *years* of playing (I've been playing since SO3) and I just close the window reflexively. (FYI, using Task Manager to kill the game without saving: the game will still Auto-Save and then quit, so the .bat files I use are necessary. I'm willing to provide the .bat file code to anyone who would like it... send me a PM here on the board as I don't feel comfortable just dumping Windows command-line code in a post.)

Yes, I am one of the "cheaters". I use it for when a jockey is a complete moron and runs the horse in a totally different way then I tell them to (even though their Skill / Honesty / Obedience scores are all 95 or better - I've had a 100/100/100 jockey do dumb stuff on occasion). I use it for when a non-Excitable horse shows up at a race very agitated (dark red). I use it when I've misjudged the optimal distance for the horse to run when the jockey tells me so, even though their Stamina bar shows something very different (say, 5f Stamina bar and jockey tells me that horse struggled for pace in a 6f race where the jockey did nothing wrong and the run was good - no blocking, good starting gate, got to the rail without issue, etc.).

Most controversially I use it for breeding, both to make sure that a breeding occurs successfully, and to try and get the best stats I can out of a breeding class for a particular year by force-quitting and reloading the year-end 1yo horse "birthing" sequence. I play the game for the breeding aspects well above any other aspect of the game, which is very different from what Mark has designed. Mark's design is awesome and is a great simulation of what the world of horse racing and breeding is like, but I enjoy watching horses absolutely crush the rest of the field in G1 races and someday hope to play in an online league. From a game design perspective, Mark wrote a simulation of horse racing and the challenges therein, but I play the game like it's a breeding slot machine, which is how I enjoy it most.

I don't care if that makes me a pariah in the opinion of other players because how I enjoy playing the game is just as valid as theirs.

I welcome comment on my post. Do other players do / play the same way I do?


Fri May 24, 2019 7:48 pm
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Post Re: Auto Save Save When Closing Screen
Personally, when I play simulations, I tend to cheat my money and then play how I want. Only time I don't cheat my money is if there's a story mode. I'll play normally in story mode but cheat in sandbox. If I find story mode boring, then I'll cheat my money just to finish it since there's often unlockables in story mode for use in sandbox.

As SO7 doesn't have a story mode and is effectively a sandbox with the only direction being achievements which are purely optional, I prefer to cheat my money. I don't see any point to putz around playing the "little league" races and buying/reselling claimers when I can just jump to the graded races. Even if you cheat your money, though, you still don't magically get the best horses. That can still take time. Sure, having money can let you buy more horses and breed with supposedly better horses early on (even the best horses on the track can turn out to be crappy sires/dams so the sellers/claimers are just as worthwhile as the G1s are), but you can start a new game, look at the starting horses, put them into the game pool, and repeat this over and over until you have a really good transfer pool, then start a real game where you can transfer them in over time. If reloading the game to reset a day is cheating, then how is transferring a super horse from one game to new one to give you a boost in one way or another not cheating? A player could even modify the schedule to include a race with very strict requirements to enable cheating. I could easily add an open H60 race that awards 100 million and only allows 5 horses. I can flood the race with my own horses after carefully prepping their rating and kick out NPCs to take the entire purse. It's a slippery slope to allow one thing but disallow another. I did notice that seller and claimer races were removed as user created races which I was disappointed about as well. I have several races in my schedule that I wanted to be claimers or sellers and can't be. Is the next step to limit the purses for each class type so I can't make an open H60 race that awards 100 million or more? Is there going to be a minimum number of horses allowed for each race to avoid setting the limit to something like 2 horses (honestly never tried anything lower than 12 personally)? What's to stop me from adding or changing several races in my schedule to being open, G1s, and awarding 100 million each with a horse limit of 2 with potentially other limits like maxruns = 1? It's not like the game has inflation so if I get enough money, it won't matter if the NPCs start winning those races instead of me.

Beyond that, I don't tend to reload to rerun a race for my horse. I run it and if they don't win, c'est la vie. Onto the next race. In my current game, I had a horse win the 2000 Guineas and the Derby ... only to get injuried with splints a month before the St. Leger. I nearly had a British Triple Crown winner in a US game. Rather than restart, I let him come back to race in the Breeders' Cup Classic which he did poorly in. I suppose I should have tried him in the Breeders' Cup Turf instead, but c'est la vie. Retired him to stud rather than try for the Pegasus Cup Invitational (which I added in my schedule) and Dubai World Cup. It'd be nice if we could make our own achievements so I could have a Triple Crown series for the Breeders' Cup, Pegasus Cup, and Dubai World Cup if I wanted. Not like the achievements really matter anyway since they reset every time you start a new game.

I don't play in the league and yet how I play gets punished because it's considered cheating? There was a program to detect horses who were bred by multiple players to avoid cheating in previous versions of the game. Why not just implement something like that to detect money or something? Or why not enable a pure sandbox mode where you can disable finances but also disables transferring horses between games? Some people don't care for the money side of simulations. I can't remember the last simulation where I honestly didn't cheat my money (or other resources) immediately on starting a new game. I used to play Sims 3 and do the legacy challenge, but usually by the time the second or third generation was born, I threw in the towel and either cheated their money or started a new game.

If people want to cheat, they'll find a way to do it. Removing the ability to reset a day by hitting the X to close the game really changes little since there are alternatives.


Mon May 27, 2019 4:27 am
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