... there's gotta be some way to make a save file self destruct or corrupt itself if moved out of the directory it was created in.
... might have to be a more extensive mod, something like NVSE, that actually replaces/hijacks the main game exe, uses its own dlls, lol.
Elon.
If you are on a ship... and there is some troublesome bullshit cargo that keeps throwing off the balance of the ship, in a storm, and that cargo is the property of an idiot who keeps trying to erect his own sail, despite have no clue what he is doing, no idea how sailing works...
You throw said dumbass and his bullshit overboard, so the ship and everyone else survives.
... Then, you mutiny against the idiot captain whos been bought and paid for by the other idiot who is currently fish food.
... I kind of find it hilarious that say... Kenshi, which allows saving and loading anytime, would have this count as an accesibility feature.
BrB, making ironman mode mod for Kenshi, save=game exits, mod allows only a single save file at a time, deletes any others, rofl.
I missed your reply weeks ago, and I know upvotes are worthless, but you deserve most of mine from this thread =P
Its been a long time since I have actually seen crowd sourcing actually work in a non exploitative way to solve a problem, be productive.
Aha! Checking back a week or so later, glad this was actually solved!
Local Autist at your service, analysis is what my brain is optimized for.
... I am just trying to 'yes, and!' this.
I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I'm replying to, so its a better fit for me.
I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.
You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.
... Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.
I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging... that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.
But many other people enjoy a different proportion of 'tinkering' to 'actually using it'. Or different kinds of tinkering.
Like... I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is... well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries... and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.
I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times... a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just... how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem... most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.
You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines... on a Steam Deck.
As far as hard modding?
A year (or two?) back now... somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card... add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply... and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.
But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC...
But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is... no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing... as an acceptable level of portability, lol.
Less ... nearly insane ... degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),
...custom colored button and dpads... sort of .. skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell... semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists...
...oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen... not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.
... Does the Pope golf in the woods?
... I mostly found your comment pitiable, not offensive.
As in, your metaphor is so crass and demonstrates such a fundamentally unserious approach to understanding reality, that it barely even registers as offensive, and immediately transcends into pity.
If you think this is some sort of... brush off your hands, phew, glad we made it out of that! type situation... if you think the suffering is over, disproportionately for Americans but also for the rest of the world...
This conveys to me that you have an extremely naive and simplistic grasp of how history moves, how international relations work, how fascism works, how economics works... etc.
... you are probably right.
If the game exe itself can... write and delete save files... and it is fairly common for extensive mods to just... literally replace the game exe... I don't really see why a custom exe could not just ... say, delete any saves you'e introduced back into the save directory manually, other than the last one it has remembered save/exiting with.
I can think of other methods of doing something that would achieve basicslly the same result (an enforced iron man mode) via other methods as well.
... I can think of even more ways to do this by making basically an open source (so that anyone can look at the code and verify it isn't malicious malware) shell script/utility type thing that runs on linux, and would mod a windows game running on linux via proton, but then the problem is that windows users would not be able to use that mod.
You could probably do the same with windows bash scripts, but i am just more familiar with linux.
Like... by your logic, it is impossible to crack a game such that it runs without DRM.
This is obviously false.
... Or, am I misunderstanding you, and you are just saying the concept of an ironman mode is ... just stupid in concept, and no game would ever support this natively?
Because again, that is obviously false, there are many games, of many different genres, that at least support an Ironman mode without any mods at all, and even a few that actually do enforce it all the time, though yes, admittedly, the games that enforce it all the time are usually more niche.
Like uh, HOI4 and Stellaris and No Mans Sky, just off the top of my head, all have built in, vanilla ironman modes. Oh and Xenonauts!
There are many, many games that do not support an ironman mode, even with mods... but have significant chunks of their communities dedicated to self imposing their own rule sets, either to make casual play more fun, or as conditions for a class of competetive speed run.
Nuzlocke rules for Pokemon games is basically an Ironman mode for Pokemon, tons of players will just do that even for casual play, to make the game more challenging.
Every game every with a 'No Deaths' rule as part of a speed run ruleset.
Some even go further into... literally you are not even allowed to ever even take any damage, as well, a 'no hit' rule or what not.