Now that the iPad's been announced, I presume that it means something for gamers. Obviously, a lot of gamers will be moving their games over to the iPad. But as it is now, game progress can't be transferred automatically via itunes between devices, like I can't have Hook Champ on my iTouch and iPhone, unlock a certain item on my iTouch, and then sync to my iPhone, and have my game the same. Hence, I appeal to the developers out there to update your games with a system whereby game progress can be carried over between devices. I'm not a developer, so forgive my asking for something I know nothing about. But a lot of gamers have sunk hours upon hours (days in my case) into games like Minigore, Ravensword, Above & Beyond, Isotope, etc, and it'll be really annoying to see all our progress go. Maybe you could allow players to create a profile online, with username and password, that saves game progress. So, in the event of a device change, one would be able to login to his or her account on the new device, and get all their progress back. I really hope you'll be able to do something about this. Please spread word among to dev community. This addition to the iDevices is a bigger one that the iPhone and iTouch, where many users had one or the other. Now, with two devices in different categories being able to play the same game, there'll be many more people with two iDevices, and they'll want to be able to synchronize game progress between them. Often times, I'll play my iTouch when it's inconvenient to use an iPad, but at others, I'll be using my iPad when my iTouch runs out of battery, etc. So really, we need this feature
OpenFeint added support for this kind of thing in 2.4 - it is called "Network save card". I'm sure their competitors will be doing the same soon.
Sorry, I don't know how many games have implemented it yet. It only just came out so I guess it will take a bit of time for this type of thing to become common.
Ah I've discovered how to use it. Does it only save the game's state at the point which you activated this feature, or will it constantly update the backup?
It depends on how the game uses it. Basically it's just a chunk of storage space on their servers you can save to or load from.
Yeah, but do you have to constantly back up the save file, or does it automatically do that? Because once I turned it on for my account, the option disappeared for all my Openfeint games. So, I can only assume that they're regularly keeping tabs on my game progress, so that once I restore my account on another device, I get my progress back immediately. If not, let's say I backed up my game progress for Minigore at 200 000 kills. So, I continue playing on my iTouch, until 400 000 kills. At that point, I buy the iPad, and install Minigore. Does it restore my game data at 200 000 kills, where I actually chose the backup option, or at 400 000 kills, exactly where I left off? I noticed that Minigore was fairly laggy after I turned it on, which I (optimistically) hope means that they're backing up every single kill I make as I make them.
It would depend on how the game implemented it. Just as whether a game autosaves or not is down to the game. You could do it automatically; you could require user intervention - nothing about what OpenFeint provides specifies.