08 – dwalker109 Interview – Cloudpoint

I wanted to touch on two things.

The first, the most recent one you said is some games save, have some weird ways of saving things, I believe.

Yes.

Do you have an example of that? I'm very curious.

Yeah.

I'm just learning about X data.

I want to talk about that too.

X data, yeah.

So what's like an example of a game that uses a quirky, let's say quirky save system?

Yeah, there's a number of different quirks with the saves, really.

Broadly speaking, most games are straightforward in that they have kind of a save system, which, I mean, on a technical level, 3DS games were distributed on cartridges.

And if run from a cartridge, the game would save your progress to the cartridge.

If run from an SD card, if they were actually downloaded from the eShop and run on the system, they would save the data to the SD card, but the game doesn't actually know that.

The game just saves its data.

So the whole kind of container format for saving data is not just files on a disc like you might find on a PC game.

It's a bit more complicated than that.

But if everything's simple, they work like that and you can just export the save and it's fine.

And some games use EXT data, X data, which is like an extra bit of save space that a game can use And that always lives on the SD card.

Whether you're playing a cartridge game or a download game, the X data is always on the SD card.

And that's used for often for extra stuff, which is big, like maybe downloading, like some games might download movies and stuff, or some games might save your replay data to X data, or it might use X data to share save state between games.

Like the Pokemon games, there's often two versions of them.

they will create some X data, which is used by both Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

They share it.

So that's kind of the lay of the land, broadly speaking.

But some games just do things differently.