Author Topic: Auto-Save Function Question  (Read 1605 times)

CruiseLite

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Auto-Save Function Question
« on: October 10, 2006, 04:08:55 PM »
I had an incident during a tournament the other night where TD crashed during play.  >:(  Actually, not TD I think but IE, don't remember the exact error, just wanted to get going again.
I restarted from my last save which, unfortunately, was at the beginning of the tournament. We got a consensus on who was knocked out by whom and resumed play to finish. For the remainder of the tourney I was saving manually pre and post of knocking a player out.

I knew there was an auto-save feature but for the life of me could not find it!  ???

Next day I reran the tournament to more closely reflect the actual playing time and did then see where to enable the auto-save function. (Also saw that "Q" would do a quick-save. I'd been going to "Game" tab and clicking on "Save". You'd think I'd have seen the "Auto-save" box then!    :-[)

My question is, what actually triggers a save?
I have the "How often to auto save" timer set to 120 seconds on the "Preferences" tab and the "Auto save" option enabled on the game tab.
The bubble help for this option shows "When checked, your tournament will automatically be saved every 60 seconds (if necessary). See the preferences page to change how often the tournament is saved."

So what constitutes "necessary"?

Can the save triggers be configured any where?

I've ran like a 100 tournaments prior to this without a hitch so my confidence level is still extremely high but just want to be able to save my butt in case it happens again (1000 tournaments down the line!   :) )

Thanks in advance for any help!

Corey Cooper

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Re: Auto-Save Function Question
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2006, 05:07:26 PM »
Writing out the tournament to disk is very CPU-intensive, and therefore the program will avoid it if it can.  Anyone who has run a 100-person tournament, or has a complicated layout, can tell you that saving a tournament can take several seconds, and the screen stops updating while it happens.  No big deal, really, unless it's happening every few minutes during your tournament.

Auto-saves are time-triggered events.  If you tell it to save every 30 seconds, it will save your tournament every 30 seconds, but only if it has to.  And it only has to if the state of the tournament changes.  If nothing has changed, then there is no reason to write the exact same file out to disk.

In a running tournament, the state changes every second (the clock ticks down).  Therefore, if you set the auto-save to 30 seconds and your tournament is running, it will save the tournament every 30 seconds.

Want to see first hand how it works?  Change the preference to auto-save every 30 seconds.  Create a new tournament.  On the Game tab, check Auto save (this will force the initial save of the tournament).  Make a change to something on this tab, like the Buy-in or Starting chips.  Now switch to the Rounds tab.  If you are not in Full-screen mode, look at the window title bar.  The name of your tournament is displayed here, and it will now have an * next to it, indicating that it has changed.  Wait 30 seconds, watching the upper-right corner of the screen.  Soon you will see an image of an old floppy-disk appear while it saves your tournament.  Wait another 30 seconds.  You won't see it again until it detects you change something and then it passes the next 30-second timespan.