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Ideas/Suggestions
Photos taken can become (cheaty) glimpses into the future
Since the photos taken during a game session are stored independently from the save file itself, if progress is lost for any reason (crash, quitting, death), then any photo that was taken between the last save and the time the progress was lost will still be available the next time the player continues from the last save, effectively showing things and places the player did not encounter yet in this restrored/continued game session.
While this can even be kind of a good thing when, for example, a crash occurred, allowing the players to retrace some of their steps, but if it was a "proper" loss of progress, eg. an in game death, then it can be used for cheating to quickly rediscover locations the player isn't supposed to know about as not having discovered yet at the point the save was made.
Maybe when a game is restored/continued from a save, before the gameplay starts, the game should check the sol and time stamp on each photo belonging to the current game and delete any which was "taken in the future" compared to the sol and time of the save that is currently being loaded.
Customer support service by UserEcho
As much as I agree with you on the aspect of it being unrealistic, I don't think I like the idea of deleting photos after death. I want the photography mechanic to be something where players are encouraged to take interesting photos that they want to access later and share with others. I don't want shots that they might want to share be deleted just because they died. What I could do though is make the game skip photos on the datapad that have a date and time that are after the current date and time.
That would still mean that once the player has gotten past the time of the progress loss, the photos from the previous session would reappear and become useable again.
How about not deleting the photos themselves, but renaming them to a different naming scheme which the game won't treat as valid datapad photos anymore so they won't ever get loaded? That way the images themselves wouldn't be lost for the player as files, but would not be usable in the game anymore.
Yeah, I was actually thinking the same thing right after I posted my response. The player could always re-edit the filename to have them viewable in-game again, but I'm not really that concerned about it. I could definitely implement this pretty easily.
If you completely removed the coordinate information as part of the renaming, there would be no way to restore them into a state where they would be actually usable again to navigate to previously visited locations even if someone tried.
Good point. I think I've found a solution that works via renaming the files. Will be in patch update soon.