Introduction.

The game Save/Load mechanism is a little complex.

This is currently a work in progress. Ship interal state and cargo are not yet saved.

The technical stuff.

Elroids is a 'javascript' game. The good thing about javascript is that it runs in a browser and has very little access to the host machine (i.e. your computer) resources. Paticulary it's file system.

This is exellent for security.

However to save/load a game image it is necessary to save a file on your machine. We have to use the, deliberatly very limited, file access that is avilable. This make things more complex that would be the case for locally executed programs.

The mechanism used may be browser specific. I have tested on Chrome, Edge and Firefox. On other browsers results may be unpredictable.

So how does it work?

• Save - Uses the 'download' functionality. It drops a single file 'ElroidSav.txt' into your 'downloads' folder (the only place it can write).
• Load - Invokes your local file selector. You can then pick a file, normally the save image, to upload. It can only read the selcted file.

Internals

Save files are simple (JSON) text.

They can be renamed/moved (e.g. for backup or multiple save postions) and should still load without problems.

They can also be examined/edited with any text editor ... Yes you can 'cheat' but, in a single player game, what's the point?