Something to show for

Since my last blog post I have kept working on my GSoC project with guidance from my mentor and we finally have some UI to show: a very primitive version of the Savestates Menu.

The current capabilities of this menu are as follows:

• List the available savestates (they are currently named according to their creation date)
• Load any of the savestates on click
• Manually create a savestate of the current game using the “Save” button

Unfortunately along with the progress that was made we also encountered a bug with the NintendoDS core that causes Games to crash if we attempt to load a savestate. We are not yet 100% sure if the bug is caused by my changes or by the NintendoDS core itself.

I hope we are able to fix it by the end of the summer although I am not even sure where to start since savestates are working perfectly fine with other cores. Another confusing matter about this is that the Restart/Resume Dialog works fine with the NintendoDS core and it also uses savestates. This led me to believe that perhaps cores can be used to load savestates only once, but this can’t be the problem since we re-instantiate the core every time we load a savestate.

In the worst case we might just have to make a special case for the NintendoDS core and not use savestates with it, except for the Resume/Restart dialog. This would sadden me deeply since there are plenty of NintendoDS games which could benefit from this feature.

On the flip side of the coin, I have been successfully able to use the new menu in order to get a better high-score at Asteroids by loading to a previous savestate everytime I lost a life 🙂 This was one of the first use-cases I thought about when I decided to work on this project and it makes me very happy to see that our work has made it possible.

While this may not be the way the game was meant to be played initially and some might argue it’s considered “cheating”, it was still a very fun way to spend an evening after a long day of work.

In the end that’s why we play games: to have fun 🙂