Asteroids are mostly located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter in our solar system. However, their orbits bring them close to Earth on some occasions, potentially raising the possibility of impact. These close calls with asteroids highlight the importance of continued technological development in asteroid detection and monitoring programs such as NASA's DART test. This will help to ensure the safety of our planet from the potential impact of these space rocks. With the help of its advanced ground and space-based telescopes, NASA has tracked an asteroid whose orbit will bring it very close to Earth tomorrow, December 28. Know all about this close encounter.
Deep Dive: Creating and fine tuning the save system of Shadow Gambit
07.12.2023 - 18:15 / gamedeveloper.com
Hi, I'm Philipp Wittershagen, senior developer at the small, independent German game studio Mimimi Games. We're best known for reviving the stealth-strategy genre with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun to critical acclaim, following up that success with Desperados III and, most recently, our most ambitious and self-published title Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which, although again released to critical acclaim, will sadly be our final game.
The groundwork for the later titles was laid by a very small development department of four people at the time of creating Shadow Tactics. Though many things were optimized later on, the architecture of the save system was defined by then and was therefore influenced by the small team size and a requirement to be ultra-efficient.
You might think, "Most games have a save system. What's so special about yours?" Let me give you a short introduction to the stealth-strategy genre and what special demands it places on a save system, after which I'll describe how our system works, how we tackled the requirements, and how we optimized it all for production.
The stealth-strategy genre, and especially the productions by Mimimi Games, feature a top-down perspective over maps of around 200x200m. This might not sound like much; however, they are densely packed with enemies and interactions. While the levels of our previous games were filled with at most 100 NPCs, Shadow Gambit, with its more open structure, sometimes has up to 250 NPCs on a single map. All these NPCs have their own detection, routines, and AI-behavior running, which the player can scroll over and analyze at all times. Add to this up to eight (though in most cases it's three) player-controlled characters with skills that can be planned and executed simultaneously, as well as various scripted events and interactions with the map that again can have all kinds of complicated logics and freely trigger cutscenes, animations or quest-updates.
Stealth games have always been prone to save scumming, though with multiple player characters and the diverse skill system, our games actively embrace this, encouraging players to try out different approaches and save and load often.
All this sets certain requirements for our save system:
To allow the team to move fast and efficiently, and to reliably save all dynamic information, one basic decision was made early in development: we would define certain root objects in the scene (so-called "save-roots"), which would introduce all its sub-objects to the save system together with all their components. All these objects, including every field referenced by them, are saved by default if not explicitly marked not to be saved.
This resulted in having our developers write code in a
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