Pausing online games?

[Manosteele117]

I love this game, put sometimes things in my friends lives put the game on hold, is there a way to pause the game so we could continue to play later? Or a way to save the battle at its current point and reboot it up at that point later... This is for online games in particular, I know how to do it for single player :S

[Garnier]

No way to save and resume (other than dumping scenario files and recreating the scenario, but this won't be exact.

For pausing, you can have someone ALT-TAB to a different program. If their game is in full screen mode, this will pause the game until they alt-tab back in. I recommend trying it in a non-important game first because it's always possible it won't work or will cause the game to crash in your setup.

[Manosteele117]

I had seen this mentioned by someone somewhere else, but when I tried to alt tab, the game didn't crash, just put me onto the desktop and the game was minimized (I was the host for this game if that matters) the other player was able to continue to play normally

[Garnier]

In your options, is Full Screen checked? In my experience, if it's checked, then alt-tabbing pauses the game.

I play in windowed mode (not full screen) so it doesn't pause when I alt tab.

[Manosteele117]

I have to check that out tommorow, one last question, is this ability only able to be activated by the host, other players connected, or both(anyone in the game)?

[Manosteele117]

Hmm, I'll have to make sure but that might be it, now will the alt tabbing work for host, other players, or for anyone within the game? So do I have to be the host to pause for everyone?

[Manosteele117]

Sorry, my phone is defective, didn't think I got my first reply through :unsure:

[KG_Soldier]

Any player not in widowed mode will pause the game by alt-tabbing.

[Saddletank]

Is there a way to pause the game so we could continue to play later? Or a way to save the battle at its current point and reboot it up at that point later.

Yes, you can do this, our KS group designed a way to carry on a game if it crashed or a key player dropped, but we've now begun using it to run linked scenarios and continued battles. I see no reason why a game voluntarily stopped could not be resumed this way. It can almost be done on the fly - the delay is about 5 mins while the host sets up the game from the last saved point (so set your autosave to as frequently as you can). You could lose a few minutes of playing time depending on how long its been since the last autosave but this method has saved our group from several frustrating play sessions and wasted evenings.

There's a member of this community called Mitra who has perfected this, I hope he sees this thread and contributes.

[mitra76]

Dumpscen or dumpoobscen (change the format of scenario file) generates a scenario file of actual battle situation in a directory scensave under work (you can find this command in the SDK). If take this and the other files from the directory netserv, you can create a new scenario directory in scenarios path which starts exactly with the troops in the same locations, morale and force at the moment of dump (and recall it as scenario not as sandbox).

two problems with this process:

the scenario.csv file generated by Dumpscen is missing of the header of oobmod column (the numbers and the headers are not aligned), so you need to correct it manually.

the full thing doesn't work well always: it happens after a battle when units are captured or disappeared because routed (but I'm not sure, it can be that this depends from the presence of detached units) that the command make crash the game and the scenario.csv is created partially). I think is a problem related to OOB consistency durig the export.