Opening a savefile in Windows

[Zero]

On my old Macintosh computer, I could open a savefile, and the metadata in the Mac filesystem would launch Angband, which then used the savefile I opened without me having to select it explicitly.

On Windows, I haven't found a way to do this. I tried giving the savefile a .angband extension, and then setting Windows to always launch files of type .angband with Angband, but that didn't work for some reason.

Is there a way to play the game without having to specify the same savefile every time I launch the application?

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by Zero

On my old Macintosh computer, I could open a savefile, and the metadata in the Mac filesystem would launch Angband, which then used the savefile I opened without me having to select it explicitly.

On Windows, I haven't found a way to do this. I tried giving the savefile a .angband extension, and then setting Windows to always launch files of type .angband with Angband, but that didn't work for some reason.

Is there a way to play the game without having to specify the same savefile every time I launch the application?

Nope, sorry.

[ekolis]

Wouldn't be too hard to add a new command-line option (for all ports) to load a savefile, though, would it?

e.g.
angband -s Ed.angband
or
angband --savefile Ed.angband

to load the Ed.angband savefile in the current directory?

A user could then create a batch file, shell script, shortcut, or whatever to call "angband --savefile" with whatever savefile is passed in to the script, and associate *.angband files with that script, allowing them to be loaded by double-clicking them...

Hmm, that actually sounds like something I might be capable of programming into the game, even with my limited knowledge of C...

I'll see if I can come up with a patch against the latest svn to do that, since while takkaria could clearly do it, he surely has more pressing issues

[roustk]

Originally Posted by ekolis

Wouldn't be too hard to add a new command-line option (for all ports) to load a savefile, though, would it?

e.g.
angband -s Ed.angband
or
angband --savefile Ed.angband

to load the Ed.angband savefile in the current directory?

For unix, they already have angband -u <who> which opens your character named <who>.

I think that the 3.1.0 Mac port is able to open savefiles in the way the original poster wanted -- in 3.0.9 it launched Angband but you still needed to select the file.

[ekolis]

Wonder why that option only works in UNIX? Wouldn't it be trivial to make it work on all platforms? Or are the savefiles for some reason encoded in a platform-specific format (e.g. you can't load a Windows Angband savefile on a Mac)? Seems like an odd design decision to me, but I suppose there must have been some reason for doing it that way if it was done that way... :P

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by ekolis

Wonder why that option only works in UNIX? Wouldn't it be trivial to make it work on all platforms?

Trivial if you know what you're doing, yeah. Also, that's the only way for Unix versions to switch between savefiles until recently-- there was no GUI to do that.

The reason there's not much point in implementing this for the vast majority of Windows users is that setting up savefiles to load up the game requires an installer or lots of manual tweaking.

[ekolis]

Well, we have one Windows user (Zero) here who is willing to do the "manual tweaking" (renaming the savefile to have some extension like .angband, and setting up the file association, which is pretty trivial itself), so why not add the -u command-line option to the non-Unix ports, and worry about installers and the like later?

I guess my point is, Windows users are not necessarily unwilling to do a little extra work to get their programs working the way they want, so if Zero wants to set up the *.angband file association on his machine, why lock him out just because of some stereotype of Windows users being lazy?

Or am I reading too much into your reply?

[Zero]

I think the best thing to do is simply keep track of what savefile was used last, and automatically use it when launching Angband.

Then we can talk about having more than one living character in a savefile.

These are both very basic features that I'm surprised haven't been implemented yet. Not that I'm criticizing any of the maintainers--I'm happy with any improvements they can make with their limited time.

[Rizwan]

Originally Posted by ekolis

Well, we have one Windows user (Zero) here who is willing to do the "manual tweaking" (renaming the savefile to have some extension like .angband, and setting up the file association, which is pretty trivial itself), so why not add the -u command-line option to the non-Unix ports, and worry about installers and the like later?

And one more. I have often tried to do just the same and failed. I would not mind manually changing the extension and associating the file with angband.

Originally Posted by ekolis

I guess my point is, Windows users are not necessarily unwilling to do a little extra work to get their programs working the way they want, so if Zero wants to set up the *.angband file association on his machine, why lock him out just because of some stereotype of Windows users being lazy?

Just because I am stuck with a windows machine (for several reasons) does not mean I cant or dont or wont move my lazy butt

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by Zero

I think the best thing to do is simply keep track of what savefile was used last, and automatically use it when launching Angband.

Then we can talk about having more than one living character in a savefile.

These are both very basic features that I'm surprised haven't been implemented yet. Not that I'm criticizing any of the maintainers--I'm happy with any improvements they can make with their limited time.

When you say "basic", I'm not sure whether you mean conceptually or in code. Certainly, I don't see the need to have more than one character in a savefile-- a savefile *is* a character, and its history. If you want more than one character, have more than one savefile.

Keeping track of the last savefile seems worthwhile, though, and a bunch of variants have done it. I think there are more important things for me to focus on at the moment (like game balance), but I always welcome patches!