High Treason, on 25 April 2021 - 01:08 PM, said:
The autosave never clicked as a potential issue to me because, probably since the first time I broke a map, I've always made regular increments, especially before and after doing any major sector work. I'd always advise people get a version numbering scheme going and do this, you'll not regret it - even if you don't break something, you can always revert a part of a map to an older version if you decide to later or reuse a scrapped area in another map even. Sometimes I even build complicated things "off-world" and import them later, as they may have made editing somewhere difficult otherwise, or activated things I didn't want activated while testing elsewhere.
You'll notice my map file names are always things like _VHT0136.MAP, where 0136 is quite literally the version number. Special versions my have a letter appended, like D for 'DOS' or C for 1.3D. The underscore is just to put it at the top of the list when loading and the short filenames are because 8.3 is a habit that won't fully die. Meaningless, but the VHT is actually "Vain House Trapped", or something along those lines, as these were the working title
Moral of the story, always do incremental saves, especially if you're unsure of something.
Another advantage of version numbers is you can quickly tell if someone is playing or hosting an outdated version of your map.
According to Monolith, collapsing sectors is 'Bad Juju'.
I feel like I could have written that post word for word, that's exactly how I do it too (minus the D for DOS thing, I do do extra letters for special versions but usually those are just test ones for when I'm envisioning an effect I'm not sure I'll keep in the end, so that if I don't like it I don't have to delete anything and can just go back) and I also got into the habit super early, as soon as I realized how unreliable OG Build could be, so it must have been 20+ years. Incremental saves are also super useful for general copy-pasting work from map to map because then the old revisions can act like just as many templates, say for SOS and whatnot, now that's something I realized not that long ago. In my case, I still save my WIP maps all the time out of habit and I'd say once every other Save is a Save As + number change, I even started keeping the most ancient revisions in subfolders a while back to avoid clutter or for every map I'd easily end up with roughly 1000 files, which is a pain in the ass to navigate through in Build/Mapster unless you get organized. I also think it's funny because indirectly, that method enables you to roughly quantify the number of times you save during the whole process of working on one map, even if you're not really trying to keep track - it's there, the insanity in plain sight.
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