In a game I play called Factorio, whenever the game is saved the entire game momentarily freezes so that exact version of the level can be saved to disk. There’s an optional saving method exclusive to Linux/Mac versions of the game called non-blocking saving which eliminates this freeze, apparently by using a kernel feature called copy-on-write fork which I think duplicates the process in memory and that duplicate is then used for saving? Meaning the live version being played never has to freeze. What’s unique about this copy-on-write fork process that has prevented it from making its way to Windows?
In: Technology
Windows does not support the fork() command so the game devs would need to implement CoW fork-like functionality themselves rather than use a pre-provided functionality.
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