Blocking the ability to save games

[rld]

I would like to see a feature added to the ACK engine that could be used (optionally) to restrict the locations where the player could save. Right now, the player can save anywhere, anytime, which makes dungeon areas and the like less challenging, because you can save before each room and just restore if you get killed.

A simple way to do this would be to add a region-specific setting to disable the "Save" command, in the same way that the "Drop" command can be disabled for particular regions. This would allow the addition of say, dungeons, where the player can't save until they exit and go back to town. By default, "Save" would be on in all regions for backwards compatibility.

Another possibility would be to simply add a macro variable, something like NOSAVE, which would default to 0 (saves are allowed by default). Then, if you set it to 1, saves would be blocked. This is a more flexible mechanism which would allow the creation of "save points" and similar features if they were needed in a particular game.

[Chris H]

That would be pretty easy to implement. Whenever I manage to get work back under control again, I'll jump into the code and see about that. The macro variable would probably be the easiest way. Set to 0 to allow saving, set to a short message number to prevent saving and show the short message of your choice explaining why.