In light of a few crashes I’ve had, it’s come to mind that the auto-save, at least for me, causes more chaos than it removes. It appears that, at least for me, when Automation crashes, if it’s attempted to make an autosave as the game crashes (I’ll assume while the Auto save is writing the .lua file), it tends to completely hose the Model. Not the trim, the model.
To put it in perspective, I’m a chronic save-button abuser. Give me an ability to throw down a manual save, and you can guarantee I’m going to click it at least once every 10 minutes. For further perspective, I can sometimes spend an hour or two trying to get the base of the car to look right before making my first trim. Now while it’s certainly annoying to have a minor crash and lose an hour or two of work between the base model and the first trim, it is infinitely more rage inducing to have a crash wipe out 6 or 8 hours worth of trims. As the past few times this has happened were related to me clicking between the Model and Trim tabs (most recently so I could add more vents to the Model because my engine needed more cooling, then to Trim to continue building, only to crash instantly after clicking Trim) and resulted in the total annihilation of the base vehicle, I’d like to be able to disable the autosave feature completely.
In short, I’d like a toggle switch to disable Autosave so that I lose 10 to 30 minutes of work, not several hours while running Automation. Especially seeing as it seems that having an auto-save hosed vehicle in the cars folder ends up being toxic to the rest, causing further auto saves to hose the models of newly built cars, only noticed on a game reload when you go to make a new trim and find the front suspension is now a nil value and the car is unrecoverable. Bad enough when it happens to one car, but frustrating when multiples happen and you can’t find the culprit.
So, having wiped out my Cars and Engines folders completely on two separate occasions because of the toxic auto save crash, I’d like an ability, even if temporary, even if I have to enter some arcane key combination to access some hidden developer’s panel buried in the code, to turn off the auto-save function. Because it’s cost me quite a few hours of annoyance having Autosave hose a car, not think about it in the moment, and then have cars fail to load after I’ve made three or four trims, saved, and headed off to do something else.
I understand, a lot of people don’t have a problem with the auto save, and probably a lot of people like the convenience of it. I’d rather take matters into my own hands with the manual save and be able to switch off the automatic saving, as it seems to cause me more trouble than it’s worth.