Yes. The scenario I'm trying to solve is a persistent server thats up 24/7 that people can JIP, leave sitreps down, move mortars and battlefield components and otherwise play then come back to it later and the efforts they made still exist on map. The problem is that not all these people woudl eithe rremeber or be admin capable of saving server state and we may have server restarts in between. The current design appears to be (although persistent is a word used) based on a single game session that the same group come back to in an organised fashion. I'm looking for an option that bridges that gap, like say the exile/epoch/wasteland style 24/7 servers use.
The challenge to this is that you need to find a way of saving automatically before a scheduled restart of the server, both in game and from outside if you restart the physical box. The current methods needs an attended save, so I understand. It seems it can cope with reducing the AI to not continue working, via one of the options in the ALiVE (required) module (disable AI) so it looks like it's been considered, in part.
The other challenge is the CPU process as it iterates through all the objects. It's not something we want to happen often, but the only way to autosave is to launch that method on a customisable timer so that in the event of the server crashing or the physical box restarting unexpectedly, the servers comes up with say a 5 minute old snapshot.
I'm not sure this fits with your lightweight "virtual AI" system which was designed to be saved to the cloud. But there are local DB's intwined with the current technology. The war room can still have its place as a stat machine, but IMHO the horsepower needs to be in a local DB for the persistence.
Why?
The modern gaming userbase has drifted from the old massive groups of loyal players. People now play multiple games, they get bored easily, they have modern pressures and cannot stick to kickoff times. People have shift work, can't stick to single evenings and even the younger folk complain of lack of time like the adults with young children do, and thus gaming groups are smaller, more dynamic, fragmented, struggling (feel free to disagree if you can remember ten years back). JIP, the term i only heard coined in Arma, suits many more people now and having a server you can jump on to, but pick back up a few days later and still be in the same session is a killer. It's effectively MMORPG style. Something that ALiVE can do that the base game struggles with is your Virtual AI system. It's genius and solves so many scaling problems (it's not new however, I'm thinking back to Falcon 4 who did this). With Virtual AI we can have game types like Capture the Island, but what we can't do is capture the island in one session. So whist solving the scaling issue, ALiVE went right up to the solution of persistence, danced with it and then dropped the ball, in my opinion.
By adding "multisession JIP persistence" you make Arma capable of large scale warfare, logistics and can play the same session at any time over the months of the campaign, with some or all of your teams without ever having to worry about someone having to press a button to save progress. Seems such a simple thing but its has got a far reaching consequence for Server admins and game designers that allows ALiVE to be a must have mod.
TLDR; AUtosave server state, autosave player state, autosave prior to mission shutdown and finally a commandline from OUTSIDE the mission that can call these functions prior to a shutdown or restart such a sa typical admin would have for rebooting so that the misison can be persistent without player intervention.
I think these items would greatly improve the uptake of the mod.
