187
GOG will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st
(support.gog.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
187 points (100.0% liked)
Games
31806 readers
1336 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That's insane, what's making up all that data?
Most games never hit anywhere near that, but some large open world rpgs like Skyrim track the location of every single object in the game world. Like you can drop a piece of cheese on the bottom left corner of the map, come back 500 hours later, and it'll still be there. now imagine all of the objects you're buying and selling and manipulating over those hundreds of hours. Now add in a shit ton of script mods and other stuff that may add even more objects. And add in all of the quest data and interaction data that gets saved etc etc, and your save file can easily hit multiple gigabytes, with each file approaching 200mb.
It still feels like it should be orders of magnitude less. For example, if each piece of cheese has an ID number that maps to cheese, an ID for what area it's in, three coordinates for where exactly it is, and maybe a few more variables like how much of it you've eaten. Each of those variables is probably only a couple of bytes, so each item is probably only 20B or so, which means that even if you interacted with a million different items and there was no compression going on then that's still only 20MB of save data.
Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it's not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.
It was a lot worse with Skyrim's original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they're most likely to have poor data management in some mod.
Aha, so unexpectedly it's bad/inefficient code that's ultimately to blame
I wouldn't say bad, but inefficient might be fair. Unoptimized I think is more representative.
Inefficient/unoptimized would be an accurate description. I think it's important to add, for bethsoft games specifically, that the save includes all changes to objects, even if the player themselves didn't interact with them(e.g. Physics interactions, explosions moving things, npcs bumping stuff around), and also includes all NPC changes. Master files(ESMs) get loaded, then the save loads the changes it has baked in to the databases. So, when you load up a save that has traveled the world and loaded a lot of things into save memory, the engine has to sit there and reconcile all the changes with the ESMs, which can add up quick if you're playing modded.