As far as I can tell…

For saving files, thispatcher accepts a ‘write’ message or a ‘writeas’ message (by the way ‘writeas’ is currently completely undocumented, in either thispatcher’s help file or its reference page).

Neither ‘write’ nor ‘writeas’ accepts any arguments: ‘writeas’ brings up a dialog, and ‘write’ overwrites the file (unless it has never been saved, in which case it brings up a dialog as well)

Therefore, there is currently no way to set up any kind of auto-incrementing autosave mechanism using thispatcher.

It’s easy enough to throw together a little autosave abstraction, but only if you want to either a) use ‘write’ and overwrite your current file every time or b) use ‘writeas’, and deal with a entering a new name in a file requester each time.

Entering a new file name each time defeats the whole purpose of autosaving.

And overwriting your current file means that the following scenario can happen:

You’ve been slaving away for hours, diligently autosaving the same file over and over. At some point, you’ve done something stupid and your patch causes a stack overflow. Max crashes. You’ve now lost the working version of your patch, because you’ve autosaved the version with the stack overflow.

Now you can’t open your patch at all, unless you hold down shift-command to defeat loadbang (a crucial keyboard command which should be documented somewhere besides the loadbang reference page). So you get to spend hours doing detective work, going through your patch, disconnecting things, attempting to load it again without shift-command, crashing Max again, etc etc

(Did this just happen to me? How did you guess?)

And searching the forums just shows that users have been asking about better filesaving support from thispatcher for literally years.

Maybe I’m missing something, in which case I hope someone will enlighten me.

Otherwise – dear friends at Cycling, can’t you do something about this?

This seems really… basic.

What an amazing feature. So as long as you can embed everything you need, you can save and recall it all as a single file!!!