Please let me save game state on all games.
 

I love my PSP for two big reasons:

1. the games often let me save anywhere.

2. if all else fails I can put it in sleep mode at any time.

All games on the N800 should do this by at least allowing me to save the game state at any time. I want to play the Mahjong game or the AisleRiot solitaire games, but if I can't stop at any time and pick it up again later then I'm not happy. I want to be able to hit a button to save the game to a file, then have the option of resuming it when the game reloads later.

Thanks for listening.

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

The inclusion of such a feature would be up to each individual game developer, unlike traditional handheld gaming systems where the platform owner enforces the standards publishers must follow.

Is simply minimizing the games an option? I haven't played either game. Do they have a timer that keeps running when they are minimized that makes doing so undesirable?

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

Good idea - we could have some kind of collaboratively-created wiki page, where "Maemo Game Best Practices" could be published, and game developers can take a look and check if their game/port fulfills the needs of the Maemo platform (most developers don't think of the special use case a mobile device brings with it).

As the original poster said, things like saving more often and allowing the user to abort/resume a game very quickly (think: waiting for the bus, ...). I currently can't think of other things, but I'm sure gamers will have more "wishlist" items. May we collect them on wiki.maemo.org?

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

You can pause any process if you know its PID.

In xterm you can type ps to get a list of processes with their process id's.

type kill -stop <pid> to pause a process with that pid
type kill -cont <pid> to resume a process with that pid

Now fullscreen apps would need a hardware key bound to some script which can detect the foreground processid, and toggle state of foreground process.

Maybe someone knows how to get foreground process and tap into sytem-level keyboard intercept?

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

I agree that this would very much be voluntary. Having to tap a couple of menu items to do it is OK by me. I have the stylus out for the games anyway.

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

You can modify libhildonwm to do your bidding, I patched it to look at another gconf key (which I can add most hardware keys to that list) and to run my program that has dbus service name of "com.qwerty12.hwscreenshot". If you check the hw-screenshot thread and look at the source package, it should all be there how it's done.

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

I agree this would be a great feature. I'm used to such a feature from playing games on my PalmOS PDA (in fact, most PalmOS apps 'save state' and come up in exactly the same position you left them).

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

Yes, but they had to, since there was no multi-tasking. We have a modern OS, so there's no reason not to leave apps running in the background. (Games are "special", as allowing them to carry on with work while the user's doing something else is usually bad, not helpful, so they do need pause, and ideally would automatically pause when you switch away from them.)

Ability to save/restore anywhere is different, and in some games may harm gameplay, so I can see why that's not always implemented...

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

I see your point, but gameplay concerns could be ameliorated by having one and only one save slot that would be forced to continue when the game boots again.

Multitasking is nice but to conserve battery life I like to close all apps when locking the tablet. If they can put in a freeze option that will take CPU usage down to near-zero I'd like that quite a bit as an alternative.

Or maybe there's a wider audience for a toolbar utility that can put selected or all apps in suspended animation immediately to free up CPU or help the sleeping process?

Re: Please let me save game state on all games.
 

Yes, I've had this conversation in the emulation scenes, where people said that being able to save anywhere might ruin the game, but I think this needs to be seen as a hibernate/resume feature, where the save state is thrown away on resume, so can't be used to keep replaying sections of the game.

Yeah I also like to properly quit apps from time to time. Even when they are minimised, I'm sure they are taking up some resources, and if nothing else take up room in the switcher.