tbh I've never opened the can of worms that is save points.
I only made save points so people would have specific locations to start from. It wouldn't be impossible to eliminate any "Entrance/Exit" type warps and replace them with Warp/OpenWipe either so no continue points would be set there.
But I can tell you about the standard continue system. First, let's assume you got ZQ 2.5x's notice that the green arrival square system is deprecated, and enabled the "Use Warp Return Points Only" quest rule.
I always put the Warp Return[A] and the Green square on the same coordinate anyway,
just in case. It's not like it can hurt anything. It can only protect someone from disaster, even if it takes literally one extra second to click the lower box and then the screen.
With that set: if you leave a DMap as level 0 and check the "Continue Here" box, you'll always start at the screen listed in the "Continue" field. Traditional overworld setup. However, if you assign a DMap a level of 1 or greater, you'll always start at the last used entry warp regardless of the screen listed in the "Continue" field. Necessary for multi-entrance maps. If you don't have "Continue Here" checked, you'll start at the last used DMap with a "Continue Here" option set, regardless of what level number you give the DMap that doesn't use the continue option.
See, this here is the part that really puts an iron bar in my bicycle wheel. If there are multiple continue statues to save in, each of which should allow you to respawn from that statue, and they're all in the same Dmap with the same Level Number,
and it's just dependent on the Dmap's continue point, then of course it wouldn't give you the option to continue from those individual statues.
You definitely raise an interesting point there, and I thank you for it. That likely means, if I have save statues scattered all over the place, I'm going to have to divide the overworld up into separate yet identical Dmaps, each of which has a closer approximate continue point to where the player would've been able to go at that point. Seems annoying, but certainly doable.
All of this requires you to use the "Entrance/Exit" warp type. If you use another warp type, the continue system won't activate and you'll start at screen 00 regardless of the screen listed in the "Continue" field.
Indeed. Though I do like to assume that the quest-designer was diligent enough to not keep the continue point at 00. That's just silly.
And you probably know that continues always use warp return A regardless of what warp return the actual "Entrance/Exit" warp uses.
A time-tested tradition, oh yes. I think people these days just place the green square out of instinct. I know I do.
So that's all I have. As a player, I generally use F6 rather than save points since I'm not entirely sure how they work, and as a designer, I don't find they feel particularly natural in Z1/Z3-styled quests anyway, so for both reasons, I've never bothered looking into them. I mean, it took me 2 years to fully grasp the standard system, I'm not ready to spend another 2 years learning an extended system
A fair thing to say, and one I wish I could join. At some point, it's a battle for sanity between the quest-designer and the quest-player. Should the quest designer put in the extra effort to make save points to assure the player their location will be preserved at that point? Or will the player be left wondering where they'll continue at all times, but the quest designer can actually release their quest within a decade of creating it. An age-old battle, surely.
Thank you very much for the response!