Allow players to return to their "best solution" / "saved solutions"

[arcpolaris]

Describe your idea

Save a player's closest solution to a puzzle in terms of Natural/Target delta or allow users to save their attempts and solutions to puzzles.

Motivation

This will allow players to return to their best attempt if they decide to reset the puzzle or try a different approach. Personally I have been in a position where I try something and then reload the page before undoing back to my previous best delta.

Proposed Solution

Allow users to either manually save their current sequence or autosave it when they reach a new lowest delta. For the latter, I am unsure how to exclude cases where the delta is low due to no pairing happening at all. Sequences for most puzzles are small and compressible, so a "my solutions" tab could be added while allowing up to an arbitrary amount (maybe 10) of saved solutions or attempts.

Other Information

No response

[luxaritas]

Thanks for the feedback!

Couple notes:

• We should totally allow for manual saves. I'd like to see this supported serverside even for challenge puzzles, so that you can save partial solutions and transfer them between sessions easily or have a ways to continue playing around with a puzzle, though there'd be extra work involved there (in some logic and reports we may tie the existence of a solution to the solve state of a puzzle/counting solved puzzles, methods for returning and displaying different "types" of solutions, etc) though manual saves to local storage need not be gated on that
• Lowest delta does not necessarily always correlate with best. Some puzzles may not have a delta, or you may be caught in a local minimum, or you have multiple constraints that need to be satisfied, so it's nontrivial to determine "best". I suppose I shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good here, but probably worth some thought [far future, it's an interesting concept for eternascript enhancements that it would be nice to have sufficient hooks that a script/extension could allow for custom definition of autosave slots by different criteria or something - my gut feeling right now though is that seems too complex/niche to build into the core app though]
• We do have a "undo to last stable" hotkey that I don't think anyone really uses - could be worth keeping that in mind that maybe there should be some alignment

[arcpolaris]

Yeah, I was worried about determining best. Safe to assume that this issue will now be about implementing manual saves?

[arcpolaris]

Additionally, should manual saves be local or server side or both? If they are local, you could keep solutions in a single file and then just add/modify entries. It would require the user to select the file every time, unless you could enter the file path and just use that every time.

[luxaritas]

Initially it'd be just local (though I'd like to see serverside eventually) - it would presumably be in IndexedDB like the current autosaves are, not a separate file