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Well, the key part of CW's response is this bit:

But it also DOES autosave the room when you run the game, it cannot do otherwise.

In order to run the game, it has to save it (and the rooms) first. That's just unavoidable. I suppose I can see how as a newbie you might expect it to work more like a preview, but building a game so it's runnable involves complicated processing of the game's project files, and so those files have to be in the state the game needs. The alternative would be to create a copy of the whole game project every time you compile, which would be a bad idea.

It just seems intuitive to the uninformed that saving should work the same way in AGS as it does in other software and would allow one to experiment to their heart's content, which is really the best way to learn. I do see how I shot myself in the foot previewing the game, but experience with various coding software, whereby one can preview the code without fear of it saving over your work, ill-prepared me for AGS with which I am unfamiliar.

I think it would be wise to at least inform the user of this, perhaps in a dialogue box when you click play or press F5, so that inexperienced users such as myself don't fall into the same trap in the future. Redoing all of that work is incredibly laborious.

After you edited room you may close it without saving (answer NO when it asks you if you want to save the room).

If it actually saves the room without asking when you close the editor, then that's perhaps a bug. I'd test that out.

But it also DOES autosave the room when you run the game, it cannot do otherwise.

I loaded a new background just to see how it would look and quickly put in some walking areas etc. just to test it out. I then ran the game and had a look, then decided to revert back to what I had originally by loading the game, only to find that my changes had been saved somehow without my consent and I now have to manually redo all of my original work to revert the room to its previous state.

The only way to work around that is to either make backup copies of your game or even better use source control utility that lets you switch between old and new states of your project files: like Git, Mercurial, SVN etc.

I will look into the options you suggested to manually backup the rooms before I edit them, though it would be nice if AGS had some sort of built in mechanism to protect against unwanted changes and allow you to revert a room to an earlier state.

Thank you for your suggestions.

[NO]

Just a simple query I've been unable to find an answer to elsewhere...

I'm fairly inexperienced with AGS but I'm quite happy to muddle through, however I've noticed that when I want to test something out, for example if I change the background image and get rid of the walkable areas and walk behinds etc. just to play around with a new room, intuitively you'd think you could simply reload the project, or close the program, reopen it and then reload the project, thus reverting all the changes; an intuition confirmed by the dialogue box which implies that your project is unsaved and changes will be lost.



So I click NO and lo and behold all of my changes have been saved upon reloading the project, helpfully undoing all of my previous work. I do like autosave features and the protection against lost work, but this in and of itself results in lost work, unless you manually make backups of your project, or make new rooms to play around with which will undoubtedly become tedious...

So... Yes, I'm a noob, how does one turn this feature off or at least modify its behaviour, as I can see no such option anywhere in the software?

Any help is much appreciated.

Regards!