Long Load times a sign of save bloat?

[Oldwolf]

Hello,

I guess the title asks eliquently, long load times on a new game...does this indicate save bloat?

My game is modded but not heavily. In fact it is 3 mods that tweak damage on high difficulty, an eye color mod, and a carryweight mod.

However I was forced to delete my game, reinstall and start a new game when the main questline bugged irreversably in my last playthrough.

[Vita, Mortis, Careo]

I have no doubt that the save files have bloating issues. BGS has been using the same engine since 2002 and every one of those games had bloating. You can see for yourself if this is the case in your saved files folder. However, yes, longer load times are one of the problems of file bloat.

[DA REEL NANCY BOI]

Quick Test: First save file, just under a cool 3MB.
Most Recent Save file for the same character: Pushing 13MB.
Deffos for realsies mate.
The progression is slow, but I'm noticing increases each time I saved. I made about 3 saves in the Institute and each one gets ever so slightly bigger.
For what it's worth, though, my most recent saves on my current character are about half the size of my other character and load times seem to be roughly the same.

[DCid]

Originally posted by Vita, Mortis, Careo:

I have no doubt that the save files have bloating issues. BGS has been using the same engine since 2002 and every one of those games had bloating. You can see for yourself if this is the case in your saved files folder. However, yes, longer load times are one of the problems of file bloat.

And yet the majority of the delusional fanboys here insist it's a new engine. But here we are... Seeing the same save bloat problem that's been an issue with Bethesda's game engine for many years. This issue was present in Oblivion.

[Gnarl]

I wonder if bloat is effecting the settlement gameplay. Like I have warning messages appear on one or two settlements when I login everyday that shows the settlement has no resources or sometimes no settlers or defense too. But when I travel to the settlement everything loads up again and the settlement is fine.

[JustOnePepsi]

Originally posted by DCid:

Originally posted by Vita, Mortis, Careo:

I have no doubt that the save files have bloating issues. BGS has been using the same engine since 2002 and every one of those games had bloating. You can see for yourself if this is the case in your saved files folder. However, yes, longer load times are one of the problems of file bloat.

And yet the majority of the delusional fanboys here insist it's a new engine. But here we are... Seeing the same save bloat problem that's been an issue with Bethesda's game engine for many years. This issue was present in Oblivion.

Actually, we see the same delusional haters who don't seem to realize that it's impossible to make an open-world game where the player can manipulate thousands of items, and the engine needs to keep track of hundreds of NPCs, and not have the save sizes increase over time. The reason Morrowind didn't have this issue (though it actually, did, it was just far less noticeable) is because most things in Morrowind were static.

The more "dynamic" you make a game, the more space is required to keep track of all the changes the player makes while playing it.

Literally every single engine you might use to make a game like this is going to have the same problem. The only exception would be games where entire cells reset completely to a specific default as soon as the player leaves it.

Try to think about things a bit before ignoring reality and looking for the easiest target to blame for whatever problems you think you're experiencing. But of course, I'm sure saying "hurr durr it's an engine problem" is much easier than using your brain and admitting you don't really understand how any of this works.

OP: Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. Your main quest could have bugged out due to factors that have nothing to do with the saves themselves. For what it's worth, my latest save is roughly 3x larger than the earliest save I have, and they both take roughly the same amount of time to load. But I also have over 40 mods installed.

[Ahroovi]

Originally posted by Gnarl:

I wonder if bloat is effecting the settlement gameplay. Like I have warning messages appear on one or two settlements when I login everyday that shows the settlement has no resources or sometimes no settlers or defense too. But when I travel to the settlement everything loads up again and the settlement is fine.

That can happen if you have a TV in the settlement. Removing my TV's fixed that for me.

[Ahroovi]

Originally posted by CVC Grouse:

Originally posted by DCid:

And yet the majority of the delusional fanboys here insist it's a new engine. But here we are... Seeing the same save bloat problem that's been an issue with Bethesda's game engine for many years. This issue was present in Oblivion.

Actually, we see the same delusional haters who don't seem to realize that it's impossible to make an open-world game where the player can manipulate thousands of items, and the engine needs to keep track of hundreds of NPCs, and not have the save sizes increase over time. The reason Morrowind didn't have this issue (though it actually, did, it was just far less noticeable) is because most things in Morrowind were static.

The more "dynamic" you make a game, the more space is required to keep track of all the changes the player makes while playing it.

Literally every single engine you might use to make a game like this is going to have the same problem. The only exception would be games where entire cells reset completely to a specific default as soon as the player leaves it.

Try to think about things a bit before ignoring reality and looking for the easiest target to blame for whatever problems you think you're experiencing. But of course, I'm sure saying "hurr durr it's an engine problem" is much easier than using your brain and admitting you don't really understand how any of this works.

OP: Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. Your main quest could have bugged out due to factors that have nothing to do with the saves themselves. For what it's worth, my latest save is roughly 3x larger than the earliest save I have, and they both take roughly the same amount of time to load. But I also have over 40 mods installed.

The problem is with the engine. People play other open world games with 100+ hour saves, and even more than that, and don't have game breaking issues after that amount of time. Bethesda games tend to have weird physics bugs, interaction issues, complete game speed slowdowns or halts, all after a large amount of time. And you know what? You can fix it with Wrye Bash. It's saved several of my Skyrim save files for a while. All because Bethesda follows the same trend of "updating" their engines instead of making a new one to really fix the issues, instead of just patching them up with bandaids.
Modders on Skyrim have eliminated a lot of bad records in the save files. Records that don't change back properly to let themselves be removed when they need to, and simply bad records that didn't work right in the first place. Significantly fixes some of the save game bloat.

And now for Fallout 4. Using the same engine that had save game bloat issues for the past 4 games, now has stuff like settlements it has to keep track of. Now considering they still haven't got rid of the Monsignor Plaza crash after all this time, do you really think they fixed sabe game bloat?

[Oldwolf]

Apologies for the late response as I took my wife out for dinner.

Thank you all I have learned a lot from this thread.

Ironically during play there seems to be very little trouble, save for an audio delay. For example when I shoot the gun bucks the enemy is hit THEN I hear the shot, and his death scream a second or two after his body has already lay(Lain, laid...my wife is the english major ) down.

It takes roughly 2-5 minutes to load into this play through.

I used "player.additem" heavily for shippments so I was getting ten shipments of matts at a time. Filling each workstation with every concievable matterial this way last play through. Thus adding thousands of new items to keep track of at a time.

Now theoreticaly that should not affect THIS play through right?

[Oldwolf]

My last save#11 for my new game is 3,795KB. Not as large as I thought it would be..

very interesting.

[Ahroovi]

It is possible it could affect different playthroughs. This crap engine is known to do directory thrashing with ESP/M files in the data folder at least. IE the soft 255 mod limit. If you have more than 255 mod files in the data folder, it reads all of them and can cause crashing, even if you don't check all of them to be loaded by the game. Hence Wrye Bash ghosting the files by renaming them with another extension like mod.esp.ghost.

I could definitely see the game doing some stupid thing like that for saves too.

[JustOnePepsi]

Originally posted by Ahravi the waff:

The problem is with the engine. People play other open world games with 100+ hour saves, and even more than that, and don't have game breaking issues after that amount of time. Bethesda games tend to have weird physics bugs, interaction issues, complete game speed slowdowns or halts, all after a large amount of time. And you know what? You can fix it with Wrye Bash. It's saved several of my Skyrim save files for a while. All because Bethesda follows the same trend of "updating" their engines instead of making a new one to really fix the issues, instead of just patching them up with bandaids.
Modders on Skyrim have eliminated a lot of bad records in the save files. Records that don't change back properly to let themselves be removed when they need to, and simply bad records that didn't work right in the first place. Significantly fixes some of the save game bloat.

And now for Fallout 4. Using the same engine that had save game bloat issues for the past 4 games, now has stuff like settlements it has to keep track of. Now considering they still haven't got rid of the Monsignor Plaza crash after all this time, do you really think they fixed sabe game bloat?

Those other games don't have the same systems that Bethesda's do, where it must keep track of thousands of random items, NPCs, quest objectives, etc, all while a player is manipulating them. Most other open world games are largely static, which environments and characters randomly generated every time the player enters any given area. Bethesda's games tend to be a little more complex, with player interaction happening in many more locations, with many more objects.

And just because you can cull improper save data with Wrye Bash doesn't mean anything beyond the fact that Bethesda is too lazy to implement that functionality themselves, the same way they're too lazy to clean up their own DLCs before releasing them, shoving them out the door with hundreds, if not thousands of dirty edits.

It has nothing to do with the engine and everything to do with developer incompetence. If you want to blame something, blame the correct things.

[Oldwolf]

And THIS:

"shoving them out the door with hundreds, if not thousands of dirty edits."

is what grieves me the most. They know. And they do it anyway.

Grouse if I had one big complaint it is that right there because of what it represents all the way back up the chain to the impatient investors.

[haljayjim]

i'm not so sure the long load times are entirely a prob with the game eng. i had the same issue with the stalker series of games that i got thru steam (installing a no steam crack dropped the load times down from 1min down to 3-5 sec). i'm pretty sure the steam overlay or interface(whatever u want to call it) is playing it's part in this load time issue.

[Chop]

Never had a single load screen take longer than 15 seconds, even for my lvl 50 character...

[Ahroovi]

Originally posted by haljayjim:

i'm not so sure the long load times are entirely a prob with the game eng. i had the same issue with the stalker series of games that i got thru steam (installing a no steam crack dropped the load times down from 1min down to 3-5 sec). i'm pretty sure the steam overlay or interface(whatever u want to call it) is playing it's part in this load time issue.

Stalker game has a lot to load with it's AI system and everything. It normally takes a while to load, especially the first time. Normal, and load times don't INCREASE after playing a while.