Inform user when their progress/records will not be saved

[byorgey]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Personally, I always forget that when I enable --cheat it means no scenario progress will be saved. It makes perfect sense, but I always think that the scenario progress saving / new game menu is broken again before realizing what's going on.

Describe the solution you'd like

• One simple thing would be to just generate a message on startup advising the player that they have --cheat enabled and thus no progress will be saved.
• However, probably no one reads the Messages on startup (I certainly don't) so perhaps a better idea would be to include a message in the dialogs that pop up when you win and/or quit a scenario, advising you that no progress will be saved since --cheat is enabled.
• Additionally, we could be even more careful to distinguish whether creative mode has been enabled at all during the current game. In theory if you start the app with --cheat but then play a scenario without ever engaging creative mode, it would be OK to save the progress on that scenario (I think --- unless there are other differences implied by the --cheat flag that I am forgetting).

[xsebek]

IIRC, --cheat gives you other developer perks in UI that could be used to cheese scenarios.

We could put a red "Cheat mode enabled" somewhere in UI and colour the outer UI border red to alert player about this.

[byorgey]

IIRC, --cheat gives you other developer perks in UI that could be used to cheese scenarios.

I don't think that's true, actually. For example, even with --cheat enabled, you can't see system robots in the Robots dialog, and you can't scroll the map, unless you actually engage Creative Mode with Ctrl-v. That was the intention from the beginning (see #360) and I seem to recall discussing that principle in one or more issues though I can't find them now. In other words the --cheat flag enables the possibility of toggling creative mode, but if you never actually exercise that possibility then the game play experience should be identical to playing with no --cheat flag.

[kostmo]

FYI currently the World Editor (#873) is only accessible with --cheat. However, modifications made to the world via this editor are intangible; the terrain/entity modifications are "painted" on a separate display layer.

[xsebek]

I don't think that's true, actually.

@byorgey could we then add a boolean flag cheated to state (and rename the CLI option - #1324) that would be turned on once the player has turned on creative mode?

[byorgey]

@xsebek Yes, I think that approach makes sense.