Hi Tupolev, reason for saving a state whilst 'in persistence' is so you can reboot the box on a schedule using Windows Scheduled Tasks and have it come up and load back into the same mission again, or if there is a crash (small chance but its been known) without any interactions at all. I can currently achieve this and I do - I don't touch the box all week, it loads an alive mission, reboots the box every night but cannot hold persistent maps. To do this I need to send a save state inside the mission on a scheduled time period. I've already asked for that enhancement and I understand that ALiVE can't do that currently. I could probably script something but I'm not sure how to either a) access the game scripting from outside in the Windows environment or b) access the Windows environment from inside the gaming scripting environment - I'm not sure these are possible as developers usually design safety mechanisms to prevent it as its a security risk.
You can't use ALiVE persistence without a server admin initiating a save so we are looking at organised group play, with a start time and an end time. That's a completely different style of gameplay to running a server 24/7 with restarts scheduled. These are fundamentally different approaches and solve different problems, just in this case not mine.
I hope this explains what i'm trying to achieve and why, i don't think anyone is really understanding it because they don't play in the same way. The benefit of this different style is leveraging persistence (proper persistance over days and restarts - unattended) with large scale conflict in order to have quite large ongoing full map campaigns that continue to play themselves out whether there is one player, a dozen players or no players. It allows a solo player to still do key things like moving supplies, setting up mortar pits and defences with ACE and marking the map with these new positions, then later perhaps the main group come on and log (after say a reboot) and then utilise whats been left behind. It allows reconnaisance and preparation to be done in a day/night cycle, sniper teams can attrit, we can have longer logistics resupply timings. And finally, it allows the admin (me) to take absolutely no part in it unless i want to, certainly not to have to turn up, save the map and close up the session when they are done.
If you can see a way to make that happen we can leverage ALiVE to run outside the gameplay session and extend into a proper war with logistics lasting some time without having to be logged into every four hours to manually save and exit form the game and then reboot it, clear up memory, patch server, check security software has latest definitions etc.
Now if I've missed something in my understanding on how to get this to work I would be delighted to be shown the way so I can achieve that.
