How do game saves work in the PC game "Dead Space"

mbeede · Post by **mbeede** » 12 Mar 2009, 21:38

Greetings - I am thinking about getting the game "Dead Space" for the PC (not the 360). I wanted to know how game saves work in the game...

Can you only save your progress at the end of each level, or does the game have periodic checkpoints w/more frequent saves, or can you load/save a game anytime you want? How does it work.

Thanks, Mark

Post by **MobsterOO7** » 12 Mar 2009, 22:01

The game uses save points where you can manually save your game. I do not recall an autosave system. Save points are not very close together either.

mbeede · Post by **mbeede** » 12 Mar 2009, 23:03

Did you find the save points reasonably spaced or did the game get really frustrating having to play portions of it over and over again.

To confirm: So you can't just do a save anytime you want then either?

Thanks for responding - Mark

Post by **MobsterOO7** » 12 Mar 2009, 23:20

I found them fine. Awesome game. Awesomeness.

Post by **Mach1.9pants** » 13 Mar 2009, 01:24

Same I am a big hater of not being able to save when I want (bl00dy consolitis IMO!) but DS was fine and worked well.
Great game, although it got a bit samey towards the end IMO

YouTube · Post by **ViciousXUSMC** » 13 Mar 2009, 06:20

I had no complaints about the save system, I could save when I needed to quit (lots of save points) and it saved progress with checkpoints every so often (not a saved game, but if you die you start from a checkpoint)

Takes a bit of getting used to the 3rd person view and make sure you do not use the in game v-sync it caused mouse lag for me. After that it was a great game and one of the best I have played in a while.

I have several HD gameplay videos on youtube to show off this game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3GeDfd-dc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFXsaFGp31U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He0gCS0prvU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pbb6bf4LMI

Be sure to use the HD button the standard youtube quality is crud, but the HD stuff is pretty good.

Frag Maniac · Post by **Frag Maniac** » 13 Mar 2009, 07:33

For some reason the quality in HD mode was not as good as I'd anticipated, not much better than the smaller window mode. It also plays noticeably laggier in HD mode. Though when trying to verify that I ran into problems.

I got through two and a half of them and the player froze trying to go from SD to HD halfway through, so I gave up. I wanted to see if it really was HD mode causing the lag or whether it was Fraps lag from the recording of fight scenes.

There's some good stuff in them but honestly I feel it would have come across much better had you tried to condense the whole level into one vid showing just the action and using transitions to cut out store activity, saves, and long stretches without action.

It would have also added some excitement and cut the length down some had you tossed an explodable canister or two, like at the little critters. If memory serves you do have the Kinesis module at that point in the game.

I noticed you're using two 4850s in Crossfire and a Q6600. May I ask what res you are capturing to and what ave FPS you get while recording? I wish I had a rig good enough to capture this game, maybe by end of '09.

YouTube · Post by **ViciousXUSMC** » 15 Mar 2009, 03:52

For some reason the quality in HD mode was not as good as I'd anticipated, not much better than the smaller window mode. It also plays noticeably laggier in HD mode. Though when trying to verify that I ran into problems.

I got through two and a half of them and the player froze trying to go from SD to HD halfway through, so I gave up. I wanted to see if it really was HD mode causing the lag or whether it was Fraps lag from the recording of fight scenes.

There's some good stuff in them but honestly I feel it would have come across much better had you tried to condense the whole level into one vid showing just the action and using transitions to cut out store activity, saves, and long stretches without action.

It would have also added some excitement and cut the length down some had you tossed an explodable canister or two, like at the little critters. If memory serves you do have the Kinesis module at that point in the game.

I noticed you're using two 4850s in Crossfire and a Q6600. May I ask what res you are capturing to and what ave FPS you get while recording? I wish I had a rig good enough to capture this game, maybe by end of '09.

It was live gameplay/walkthrough not a trailer. If you lagged you probably needed to let it preload longer or youtube was having issues. The difference between HD and normal is HUGE I mean its atleast 5x better so not sure what problem you were having, its the difference of sharp text and graphics and the blur that is youtube.

Though I apprecaite the feedback.

As for my rig, yes dual 4850's and a q6600 my in game fps is very high over 100 but I use vsync so it locks at 60.

My recording settings is full screen (1920x1080) @ 30fps, so Fraps will cut it down to 30fps instantly as it locks to the capture rate, but it does cause some lag when recording mostly due to pegging the hard drive with recording a file thats like 3gb in 30 seconds... I think the lag is due to that and not due to the cpu strain but fraps does hit the cpu hard.

DaFox · Post by **DaFox** » 15 Mar 2009, 05:02

For some reason the quality in HD mode was not as good as I'd anticipated, not much better than the smaller window mode. It also plays noticeably laggier in HD mode. Though when trying to verify that I ran into problems.

HD youtube lags for me and most other people that I know aswell.

Frag Maniac · Post by **Frag Maniac** » 15 Mar 2009, 07:32

With good compression techniques, you really don't need to capture to that large a res, esp just for displaying them on YouTube. That's your main problem concerning lag while capturing.

It's also good to capture to a secondary drive and have both drives fully defragged before doing so. I also use AlacrityPC to shut down all background apps and non essential services while playing/recording.

What codec are you using to compress with and what editor do you use? I was using Xvid/LAME and VirtualDub/Audacity, but lately have switched to x264/NeroACC and AutoMKV. I still use good old VDub and Audacity for editing though.

YouTube · Post by **ViciousXUSMC** » 17 Mar 2009, 06:24

With good compression techniques, you really don't need to capture to that large a res, esp just for displaying them on YouTube. That's your main problem concerning lag while capturing.

It's also good to capture to a secondary drive and have both drives fully defragged before doing so. I also use AlacrityPC to shut down all background apps and non essential services while playing/recording.

What codec are you using to compress with and what editor do you use? I was using Xvid/LAME and VirtualDub/Audacity, but lately have switched to x264/NeroACC and AutoMKV. I still use good old VDub and Audacity for editing though.

I encoded it to a file size 1/10th of the original with x264 before sending it to youtube, but capturing it is what I was saying is large.

No way can you send a uncompressed 10min video to youtube, remember they have size restrictions.

My editor if I have to edit the file is Sony Vegas Pro, I export it as a uncompressed HuffYuV file.

Then I encode it with very high settings with x264 for the video file, then dump the audio to .wav with virtualdub, encode the audio with NeroACC and then mux them together with MP4Box (as I use .Mp4 files, I would probably use AutoMKV if I used .mkv files but youtube recommends .mp4's)

I use Avisynth scripts to feed my files into x264 and can do minor editing like splicing of the clip from there if desired.

There is a moment or two that lagged while recording so those are going to show up no matter what. However by large the video has no lag for me as long as I let it preload long enough to not cause any breaks for loading. On my fast home connection I do not even have to wait as long as youtube is up to speed.

Dopefish here on our forums taught me pretty much everything I know for the manual command line encoding of x264 and got me to the advanced level I am at now. Before I was at the mercy of GUI's and some of them are not too bad.

I can recommend:

AviDemux
MeGUI
StaxRIP
HandBrake

All of them have there advantage/disadvantages but by far I found those 4 to be the best.

The few flaws I found in each may have been fixed by now and offer a viable replacement to doing it the manual way. Id say MeGUI was pretty much already there.

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