Rollback vs. Readback / Log Mode

[chisa-chan]

A friend o' mine somehow complains about Ren'Py's rollback while playing MagBou (in the NVL-mode). He said that rollback makes the last screen cannot be displayed entirely (as in log mode).

Me? I think I'd prefer rollback, since log mode only displays last text window, and cannot change choices in the menus, though sometimes I'd prefer log mode >.< (unless for VN-linear, perhaps log mode is not bad at all)

[Enerccio]

I prefer readback (log mode)
I hope that pytom will repair it soon.
And for nvl, there should be second readbak, which will display whole previous page on on roll back.

[chronoluminaire]

I was one of the people who originally asked for readback mode. Py'Tom considered it a serious misfeature then, and only implemented it under near-duress.

But since then, I've come round to see his point of view. If you allow saving and loading of games (and you should), then disabling rollback to use readback instead isn't removing anything except convenience.

[DaFool]

Depends on the game.

Highly literary games, such as a few onscripter examples, which rely mostly on words for effect, should have readback.

More animated games, especially with sprites that blink, talk, and change facial expressions constantly, should be rollback... I would be more curious about revisiting an expression rather than a certain line.

[Criptych]

Depends on the game.

Seconded. Actually, it would be nice if you could select which to use by setting a config value, but I doubt it's that easy when readback requires a special type of Character.

[chisa-chan]

Actually, it would be nice if you could select which to use by setting a config value.

Yeah, right...

[monele]

Shouldn't it be up to the player instead ?

[chisa-chan]

Shouldn't it be up to the player instead ?

Hmm... I guess it is much better.

[Criptych]

Whether set by the scripter or by the user, the consensus seems that we'd like readback mode to be a little easier to use. I'm just kind of throwing this out here, but: would it be possible to make readback mode a "limited" form of rollback, i.e. it gets the text data from the rollback buffer (but nothing else)? If so, you could switch to readback by setting a flag, and even make it an option accessible to the user.

[PyTom]

Readback mode is currently broken. Frankly, I have little desire to go in and fix it... it was always fairly lousy, and rollback does everything readback does, better. I don't feel like wasting my time on something that will makes games worse.

[chisa-chan]

Readback mode is currently broken. Frankly, I have little desire to go in and fix it... it was always fairly lousy, and rollback does everything readback does, better. I don't feel like wasting my time on something that will makes games worse.

Well yeah.

Though rollback only moves to previous screen step-by-step (in NVL-mode), I still love it.

But I like KiriKiri / KAG's log mode. Very cool.

[Enerccio]

Maybe it will make them worse, but its on the game maker to choose... and few of us like it (like me)

[PyTom]

Yes, but it would fall on me to code it, and I don't see spending a lot of time working on something that will be little used, and that when used will tend to make the games its in worse.

[chisa-chan]

Yes, but it would fall on me to code it, and I don't see spending a lot of time working on something that will be little used, and that when used will tend to make the games its in worse.

Hmm, right.

Perhaps it would be better if NVL-rollback is like this:

- when there is any change at the images or some other things in the middle of NVL-screen, rollback to that point.
- if no interaction occurs while showing the NVL screen, rollback to previous NVL screen entirely.

How about it?

[PyTom]

That's actually hard to do, since it's pretty hard to identify the points where you want to stop the rollbacking. I'll think about it, since it's not a bad idea, but don't expect this anytime soon.