Save game file sizes

[sheek]

Yeah if you want your OS to become totally inefficient, and be unable to find files you want through search.

 

[Major_Boobage]

Who cares about HD space when a terrabyte HD costs 90 euro's.

If your C partition is too small, resize it. Non-issue detected.

What if I just prefer to have the savegames in the actual game folder, where they belong?

Then dont play the games that save in mydocuments? What are you trying to achieve here? A lot of games save in mydocuments now and there is nothing you can do about it. Frankly if that is the worst problem with pcgames then i would be glad.

I am used to games saving in the gamedirectory but this has changed and it isnt that BIG of a problem tbh. I just copy the entire map. It's not like it is hard to find these directories now is it?

 

[sheek]

You're not German are you?

 

[obediah]

One other point is that there is a tradeoff in load/save speed and file size. It's a tight rope walk, because Sheek is just as likely to start a "why do game saves take so fucking long" thread if they choose poorly.

And games tend to have a lot more state than they used to. Overall, I think this is pretty great. Setting aside 128kB of memory to track the location and state of everyone in a game, is a big commitment when you have 16MB of RAM to work with. But with 2GB, you can throw it in, and rewrite it as a 512kB structure to optimize for access speed.

 

[JarlFrank]

Then dont play the games that save in mydocuments? What are you trying to achieve here? A lot of games save in mydocuments now and there is nothing you can do about it.

LOL IF YOU DON'T LIKE WHAT THE GAME DOES WITH ITS SAVEGAMES JUST DON'T PLAY IT

Stupid retard argument.
And what's wrong with complaining about something you don't like? You seem like a stupid fanboy who defends Oblivion's level scaling or something, only that you defend the savegames in My Documents shtick. I'd prefer it if games let you choose where to keep your savegames. Like King's Bounty did. I don't think that would be so hard to implement, would it?

 

[Major_Boobage]

Of course it is better that they save in the gamedir or that you atleast can choose where they save.

However if you can't, you can't. Most of the time it wont even matter because you will just play the game and finish it without ever looking at the savegames.

It's a non-issue. They should better fix incompatibility problems with OS's and GFX cards.

 

[Jaesun]

All you bastards who bitch about My Documents in system partition, you do know that you can move the folder right?

For XP: http://www.watchingthenet.com/change-location-of-mydocument-folder-in-windows.html

For Vista: http://www.vistax64.com/vista-file-management/122908-how-move-my-document-dpartition.html

I never knew that.

I still wish games did just save in thier respective game directories. But MyDocs is apparently the NEW SHIT!

 

[Major_Boobage]

New shit? It has been happening for over 5 years?
Have u guys just recently started playing games that arent from the 90's?

 

[TheWesDude]

games saving in the my documents area is required for vista approval for Games For Windows. which is the current standard in PC gaming.

to get MS seal of approval, there are a multitude of things that have to happen. 1 is saving savegames in my documents. reason being is when games save in program files, depending on the user access of the logged in user, may not have rights to read/write to program files. so by requiring them to save in my documents, it alleviates this problem.

thats why games save in my documents. for people who use windows properly without being logged in primarily as admin rights account, cant write in program files as a security issue.

its a problem for me because i do not put games/apps on my C drive but one of my 7 other hard drives. so saves in my documents is aproblem for me because my C drive is my smallest HD.

 

[JarlFrank]

Vista approval is such a silly thing.
Since when do programs need to be fucking approved in order to run on the OS?

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

Not all modern games save in MyDocs, so that adds to the confusion. For instance, Steam games do not.

 

[rpgcodexusername]

Well at least savegames arent buggy anymore.]

In Age of empires 1 I could only save after a level otherwise the save game was corrupted.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You should see the progression for console games. PSX cards had 15 blocks, for a total of 1MB of room. Diablo took like 14 blocks or something. Most games, however, took 1. So you can save your FF7 game with about 8kb. Which is probably still more than you really need. I mean, what are you even saving? A handful of numbers: Current save point (Probably less than 100 possible of those in the game, though you might need coords for an overworld map save) current equipment, and some stats, of which xp is the only large number. I could write a full text description of my exact game state in most games in under 8kb. Nevermind how little it should take when you're only using notation.

Jump ahead to the PS2. Naval Ops has an icon of a rubber ducky for it's save file. This takes up about an eighth of the EIGHT GB CARD. And it doesn't need to record fuck all for game data, just some ship builds. No massive world with a billion possible item locations and door open/close states like Morrowind or diablo. A fucking gig to save the damned game.

I think I've seen a 2GB save file before too, from the sequel iirc. But the average is still ~200MB.

The PSP is equally retarded in some cases, with fucking animated videos embeded in the save files.

 

[obediah]

Jump ahead to the PS2. Naval Ops has an icon of a rubber ducky for it's save file. This takes up about an eighth of the EIGHT GB CARD. And it doesn't need to record fuck all for game data, just some ship builds. No massive world with a billion possible item locations and door open/close states like Morrowind or diablo. A fucking gig to save the damned game.

I think I've seen a 2GB save file before too, from the sequel iirc. But the average is still ~200MB.

Wow, I don't think my naval ops 2 save was 2GB. I had several of them on an 8 MB memory card, so that would be quite an accomplishment!

 

[DraQ]

Savegames belong in the game's folder, not in some My Documents on fucking C. Dammit.

This.

It's even better when the game has built-in simple file manager and directory navigator allowing you to chose where do you want your game saved - Frontier has it, but such a feature, being advanced '93 concept, is probably too ahead of our times for today's developers to wrap their heads around.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Jump ahead to the PS2. Naval Ops has an icon of a rubber ducky for it's save file. This takes up about an eighth of the EIGHT GB CARD. And it doesn't need to record fuck all for game data, just some ship builds. No massive world with a billion possible item locations and door open/close states like Morrowind or diablo. A fucking gig to save the damned game.

I think I've seen a 2GB save file before too, from the sequel iirc. But the average is still ~200MB.

Wow, I don't think my naval ops 2 save was 2GB. I had several of them on an 8 MB memory card, so that would be quite an accomplishment!

Ok, so I was off by a factor of 1000 or so

It's still retarded. What the fuck do you need 2MB for for Naval Ops? Especially when something as horribly compicated as Diablo (potentially hundreds of items each with individual randomized stats located anywhere on any of what was it, 16 floors?) takes 120kb.

 

[skyway]

It's still retarded. What the fuck do you need 2MB for for Naval Ops? Especially when something as horribly compicated as Diablo (potentially hundreds of items each with individual randomized stats located anywhere on any of what was it, 16 floors?) takes 120kb.

Its you, who are retarded. Diablo is random...

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

It's still retarded. What the fuck do you need 2MB for for Naval Ops? Especially when something as horribly compicated as Diablo (potentially hundreds of items each with individual randomized stats located anywhere on any of what was it, 16 floors?) takes 120kb.

Diablo uses procedural generation for its maps and items, so I'm guessing only the random seed value was stored. An integer would be plenty, in this case, and is usually only 4 bytes (although, it depends on the system).

 

[Damned Registrations]

That's still an integer for every item (Likely a second for it's location.) What the fuck do Naval Ops need instead? A well written history of every different CWS on the ship?

(Edit: Diablo also keeps track of every fucking corpse in the game.)

 

[obediah]

That's still an integer for every item (Likely a second for it's location.) What the fuck do Naval Ops need instead? A well written history of every different CWS on the ship?

(Edit: Diablo also keeps track of every fucking corpse in the game.)

The game does keep track of a bazllion little things, and the customized ships are a more complicated state than you see in most console games of that era.

But I think you could store everything the game tracks in 100K or less. That leaves either laziness or optimizing for save/load speed.

 

[1eyedking]

To stay on topic... fucking Witcher with gigs and gigs of savegames.

Goddamit Witcher leave my fucking disk alone!!

 

[Kortalh]

I wouldn't mind so much if they'd put all the saves in a save-specific subfolder.

For example:
C:\Users\Kortalh\Documents\GameSaves\

The thing for me is that I like to use my Documents folder for... you know... documents. I always used to keep my college homework, budget spreadsheet, hobby art/writing, and other misc. project files in there.

But now I have to sort through a bagillion savegame folders (some of which are leftovers from games I've uninstalled) in order to find the actual documents in the My Documents folder. They've got folders for Videos, Pictures, Music, and all sorts of other stuff -- why can't they just make another one for Saves?

Edit: I just realized that Windows 7 does have a Saved Games folder. Hopefully that's something that will catch on. Now if only there was a way to make it work for older Documents-using games.

 

[DraQ]

The games should have two preset settings - default would save to a standardized* directory in 'documents and settings', alternative would save to a 'saves' sub directory in game's root; they also should have simple tool allowing user to specify their own path for storing things like saves and screenshots.



*) Fuck you, STALKER.

 

[ever]

Its really not a problem when you're running 4 terrabytes

I'm not kidding either, some of oyu guys need to upgrade your hardware.

 

[skyway]

So we could finally play Shitout 3?