[NEW UPDATE] Thief Buddy (v2.0) Quicksave Utility [upd. 17 Feb 2023]

fortuni on 21/2/2023 at 14:50

Quote Posted by Plibb

I still pop a hard-save when I reach a 'landmark' or do something that feels significant

Make sure you keep hard saving, it would be supremely ironic for TB to solve one problem only to introduce another, arguably more severe problem.

VoiceActor on 21/2/2023 at 18:04

Quote Posted by fortuni

Make sure you keep hard saving, it would be supremely ironic for TB to solve one problem only to introduce another, arguably more severe problem.

Que? Don't understand that bit - unless you mean what you wrote here? :-

Quote Posted by fortuni

I'd be interested to discover if those who use Thief Buddy stop hard saving once they are fully comfortable with TB , only to discover they can't reload from a very much earlier time in the mission because TB has over written their previous quick saves.

Okay, so YMMV - but I use it like this:

I make chapter-style hard saves at important points exactly the same as ever.

Re quicksaves: well personally, I don't limit backups at all, so not being able to reload an old moment would never occur for me. In play, I literally just ignore the fact that these extra backups are being made, but the important bit is that I now have peace of mind in case I mess up (or the game messes up!). That's simply all I want from it. And at the end of an FM, I just delete the whole set of them. BTW, some stats on the logic of not limiting my saves:-

e.g. 10 expanded FMs + zip sources take up avg. 4Gb drive space = 400Mb per FM on average. My loader still has 50+ in there which I need to prune some day!!

100 quicksave backups use only 300Mb of space (which will only exist until you finish the FM - then can be deleted anyways).

Has my gameplay changed at all? (this is a great question!) Yes, I suppose it has (slightly) - and for me, it's for the better (esp. if using timed saves @ 1m) - in that I now stay immersed in the FM for much longer periods. I want to maximize gametime as much as possible so I want less decisions on do I save here / now? etc. In fact the suggestion to have timed saves was excellent imho so I'm glad it got implemented. Again, YMMV! ;)

Quote Posted by fortuni

I've set TB up for use with FMSel (I don't use Angel Loader) and quickly disabled the sound as it starting annoying me, but guess I won't use it regularly as it's an extra bit of set installing my FM folder and Thief install into TB every time I start a new mission that I know I probably will forget about doing quite quickly, but it's a neat bit of kit, so big thank you VoiceActor for a great addition to the ever growing Thief mod collection.

Glad you like it overall fortuni. Maybe other loaders will accommodate TB's load arguments at some point. I must say it's brill now it has AL integration - instant play as it always was, and TB starting as a background task automatically.

For non-AL loaders, it takes so little time to set your FM folder manually - after which you get 2 - 8 hours of play (and once set, the path gets remembered for that FM, next time you run TB of course).

This may interest you - the sound option I use is from a Thief SFX folder (mine is turclose.wav) - it's set very quiet to just hint that a save has successfully backed up. Being a Thief sound, it blends perfectly with the game sounds I'm hearing all the time anyway so it works great for me. But of course you can turn it off in Settings for sure :)

In case a gameloader author wants to update their code in the way AL has been updated, you set a variable e.g 'TBPath' to the "InstallLocation" reg_sz value taken from:

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\VoiceActorWare\Thief Buddy"

then call the exe command like this:

"[TBPath]\Thief Buddy.exe" [FMpath] -startwatch

All the best - got finger-ache now hehe!

VA

fortuni on 21/2/2023 at 18:58

Yes that's exactly what I mean, if some players subconsciously become so comfortable with TB that they stop hard saving and only have set TB to save say 30 saves at 1 minute intervals, if at a later stage in the mission they discover they need to return to a point 45 mins earlier then they may have a problem.

The other major advantage of hard saves over TB is that you are prompted to give the hard save a title, whereas with TB you tend to just carry on playing (sure you can rename the saves manually but whose going to do that in game) so finding the right TB save from your TB saves folder may not always so easy.

The other issue I noticed is all of TB screenshots tend to be relatively dark (as in Thief default gamma non brightness) whereas as I play with my gamma turn up almost to the max, as I actually want to see the enviroment and enjoy the artistry of the author, but checking my TB screenshot I sometimes wondered where the hell was that save? :laff:

Minor grips I agree as TB is just brilliant, but in a couple of ways it does have a couple of short comings.

Guess I need to get used it it.

VoiceActor on 21/2/2023 at 19:38

Quote Posted by fortuni

Totally agree with that - complacency and laziness is always the eternal enemy, so we should all heed the point, yes. In all honesty, when I started playtesting betas etc, I was getting very complacent for a while (mostly because of the tests), and this did spoil a game. For real usage, if used mindfullly, it should serve you well.

Quote:

The other issue I noticed is all of TB screenshots tend to be relatively dark (as in Thief default gamma non brightness) whereas as I play with my gamma turn up almost to the max, as I actually want to see the enviroment and enjoy the artistry of the author, but checking my TB screenshot I sometimes wondered where the hell was that save? :laff:

Strangely - I had this dark gamma issue in The Scarlet Cascabel - hence the increased gamma option under the Quicksave Monitor button. This pushes gamma up quite a lot and saves are very viewable then. I had noted that T1 games seemed to produce dark saveshots regardless of in-game gamma, yet T2 games always produced exactingly loyal copies. Nevertheless, the real solution here was given to me by Fen who I'm sure won't mind me quoting him:-

From FenPhoenix to me when testing:-

Quote:

I don't know about this, but if you're getting a difference in gamma capture between games, it could be that one of your games has the d3d_disp_sw_cc option enabled in cam_ext.cfg, and the other doesn't.

The cam_ext.cfg should contain a section like this:

Code:

; enable software (ie. shader) based gamma and color processing (improves quality at the expense of performance,
; and also enables in-game gamma to be applied in windowed mode)
;d3d_disp_sw_cc

If d3d_disp_sw_cc is uncommented, then gamma will be able to be captured by external apps (screenshotting, video recording, etc.). The note for this line is slightly misleading, it makes it sound like it's only to do with windowed mode, but it also allows gamma capture, which it doesn't mention.

This knowledge from Fen was so useful - I changed it, and hey presto all my gamma levels for save-shots were loyal to the setting I had chosen. I hope this is useful to you.

VA :)

fortuni on 21/2/2023 at 20:21

Quote Posted by VoiceActor

I had this dark gamma issue in The Scarlet Cascabel - hence the increased gamma option under the Quicksave Monitor button. This pushes gamma up quite a lot and saves are very viewable then. I had noted that T1 games seemed to produce dark saveshots regardless of in-game gamma, yet T2 games always produced exactingly loyal copies. Nevertheless, the real solution here was given to me by Fen who I'm sure won't mind me quoting him:-

From FenPhoenix to me when testing:-

This knowledge from Fen was so useful - I changed it, and hey presto all my gamma levels for save-shots were loyal to the setting I had chosen. I hope this is useful to you.

VA :)

You bleeding life saver....

I take 100's of screenshots every week whilst making my lootlists and walkthroughs, mainly taking screenshots of custom textures to paste into any maps that I make, but they always come out so dark I have to use a photo editor to brighten them and usually they end up frighteningly over brightened.

For years now I have been using Pixir, but only this week they changed their permissions only allowing 2 free saves per day and I often need 20-30+ and so didn't want to pay them $7pcm.

I've spent the last week trying to find a free alternative to Pixir but so far have only found GIMP but I haven't got used to it yet as it keeps saving my amended screenshots in .xcf format which is a complete pain. I've discovered how to save their amended pics in .png as I wish, but to not have to use a picture editor at all will be so useful.

VoiceActor on 21/2/2023 at 20:30

You have to thank Fen, not me! He gave me so many pointers and erudite knowledge. Hey! An even better way to thank him is to start using AngelLoader hehe!! :laff: (sorry - couldn't resist! Ahem!!)

Best ones to you fortuni
- VA :)

FenPhoenix on 21/2/2023 at 23:20

I think TFix/T2Fix should maybe consider enabling d3d_disp_sw_cc by default, as I can't count how many times I've advised people on turning it on to fix the gamma capture, as it's an extremely non-obvious solution. Even if someone knew about cam_ext.cfg, and specifically went looking in there, the line's description doesn't even mention that it also fixes gamma capture, so it's nearly impossible anyone could know it does that without trial-and-error.

The line does say it "improves quality at the expense of performance", which might be reason for a cautious patch author not to enable it, but I've tested with it on and off and not noticed any performance difference whatsoever on a GTX 1070. Maybe on an integrated Intel or something there could be a perf loss, but I can't test that. Maybe someone else could. But I'm honestly rather skeptical that there's any perceptible effect on performance here, it may be theoretical only, or negligible. On the other hand, the benefit is large for anyone taking video or screenshots.

baeuchlein on 25/2/2023 at 03:03

I have done a few tests on slow old machines with poor graphics hardware. See (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149669&p=2498287&viewfull=1#post2498287) this post for details. Bottom line: Only in some special spots where lots of stress is put onto low-performance graphics chips some kind of lag, stuttering and worse was seen. Looks like the performance effect is not visible under normal circumstances with decent hardware.

Taffingtaffer on 8/3/2023 at 15:42

I know Wine is not a main focus for these apps, but as of now it doesn't work correctly under it. As soon as the sidebar appears, any button inside the main "window" stops working. I can only interact with the Main screen if the sidebar isn't active yet, and then only with the sidebar sections.

VoiceActor on 9/3/2023 at 18:41

Quote Posted by Taffingtaffer

I know Wine is not a main focus for these apps...

WINE can apparently be (in)famous for not running Windows apps correctly - hey, you probably know that! As long as your dotnet framework is installed at v4.7.1 or higher, I can't offer any other ideas apart from setting up a dual boot device to run real Windows, or use a virtual machine. It runs fine in fact on a virtual machine - even running a really old W10 LTSC version. If I've missed the mark with the advice then I'm sorry, but WINE emulation was never in the remit for me.

Kind regards
VA