People might want to save things like overlays if you have items that are equipped shown on your character, and saving icon state might be needed if it changes, also saving icons where people can have custom icons in a game.....

There are reasons for saving such things & this could break existing games, sure the games could re-code to save all these still but most save codes simply save everything except the tmp variables.

Superbike32 wrote:

People might want to save things like overlays if you have items that are equipped shown on your character, and saving icon state might be needed if it changes, also saving icons where people can have custom icons in a game.....

There are reasons for saving such things & this could break existing games, sure the games could re-code to save all these still but most save codes simply save everything except the tmp variables.

icon_state is fine since it is text, but any default variables with icons attached to them should be tmp or allowed to be changed to tmp somehow.

People are programming their game wrong if they are keeping track of equipped items by their overlays.

No respectable game designer would allow players to upload their own icons unless the game revolved around such a thing like the "icon games" on BYOND, and those few cases could easily manually save them (if they'd even want to save icons).

Not having massive cluttered savefiles and corrupt icons and such would help newer developers who don't understand the workings of savefiles to improve the performance of their games as well.

Changing this behavior would break legacy games. But I'm amenable to the idea of using some kind of flag for this purpose.

So, far, I've just had to manually override the Read and Write procs for this purpose. Including this as a feature would be quite helpful.