In early January, we started working on the Gas Update 0.9. The first thing we did was to revise the save system in response to numerous requests from the community. We would like to present the changes to the save games that will come with the 0.9 update in a few months today.
Saving After Every Turn
From the beginning of development many years ago until today, All Quiet in the Trenches has undergone many changes. The decision to only save at the beginning of a level was made at a point when the playing time of a single level was still considerably shorter. This system was easy to implement and served its purpose well at the time.
This system became increasingly impractical the longer a single level took to play. This revision of the save system has therefore been on our to-do list since the beginning of Early Access. Due to the many requests from the community to adjust the save system, we felt it was important to address this now.
With the 0.9 update, the game will save at the beginning of each turn. While saves at the beginning of each level will remain permanently, there will be a certain number of save slots (currently 10, but there may be an option to set this in the settings) per game for turn-based saves.
Revision of the User Interface
The most important changes to the UI are as follows:
A thumbnail for the game is created when saving, which improves the overview and identification of the individual saved games. The active soldiers are displayed as icons. The saves for each playthrough are grouped together to provide better structure in the window, and the key information has been restructured.
Further Changes
Due to the aforementioned changes, it will no longer be possible to open older saves from version 0.8 and earlier.
However, the system revision will also bring other improvements: the size of the individual save games has been reduced somewhat, whilst the performance when loading the information has been significantly improved. This has eliminated the lag when opening the window.