Improving Load & Save Time possible?

[Graf_Eisen]

for example makes a SSD any diffierence? what you guys have done for speed up save & load?

[SeedBox]

I have SSD and pretty fast gaming laptop.. still takes long (compared to other games).. 1 min and above save time.. load almost 2 min I'd say never timed it. It's just the game, don't think you can do much.

[M4²⁰]

you could try clearing all your game logs,....

not likely to see much difference though

[Gregorovitch]

Fast SSD's help a bit but main reasons it takes so long to save (and load) are a) the game has many thousands of objects to save and b) they are all written to XML and it's building the XML document that takes the bulk of the time, not the writing of the finished XML document to disk.

Bernd (Egosoft CEO) addressed this subject in a recent interview with SpaceGameJunky (you can find him on Youtube, podcast #355 IIRC)) and he said they were very aware of the issue, particularly with saves, but they hadn't come up with a satisfactory answer yet. However he said they had a specific project going looking at this problem at the moment in the hope of finding a way to reduce save times.

[Captiva]

I use a normal SSD. Takes about a min and a half to two min to load game, and about the same to save game.

Nothing crazy, but yeah, it takes a bit more then other games.

[hurepoix]

SSD will improve, but cant do miracle. With a fast Nvme M2, game load in 40 secondes, then save take 1mn 20 seconds to load.

[rasabt]

yeah, it's not optimal.
saving takes about 45 sec. , loading..well the first load a min or so.
but i get it:
just look at the insane amount of persistant information beeing saved
from your own avatar position, to pretty much every minute detail...orders, transactions, movement, attacks, everything, everywhere.
let's hope their "project" can lead to improvements, but ah well, it's not the end of the world.

[Nunoko]

When I look into a uncompressed save game file, you can see markup xml code.
Would it be faster if they encode it differently?

Also I am not sure.. but if the game saves, does it write a 100 mb file which then it compresses it and then deletes the 100 mb file (while keeping the compressed file as savegame) ?

[Zloth]

Doubt it - more likely they build the whole thing in memory, then make a compressed version in another hunk of memory, then dump it to disk.

Guessing from what the devs have been saying, the slow part is changing all that binary memory into strings, not writing to the disk or compressing the file. Maybe they could dump it out in a way similar to gRPC instead of SOAP-style? Honestly, it's hard to even guess without spending a lot of time buried in their code.

P.S. After a few seconds of saving, I can hear my GPU fan slowing down!

[Daddy Shark]

It makes sense. There's a massive amount of data to save and load.

[Bert]

Any storage device that is capable to write with low latency and high bandwidth on small block sizes. The save files consist of mio of lines so small block perf is where it is at.

[cwsumner]

They are using XML and that is very bloated, it was designed for flexibility and readability not speed.

However, it will never save like other games because this game is not at all like other games. Things are happening everywhere all of the time and it all has to be saved.

[Bozz 💀]

yeah the game has a lot to save so it takes some time, devs still try to improve it but it's never gonna be super fast there is just too much to save

[Bert]

Originally posted by cwsumner:

They are using XML and that is very bloated, it was designed for flexibility and readability not speed.

However, it will never save like other games because this game is not at all like other games. Things are happening everywhere all of the time and it all has to be saved.

Originally posted by Bozz 💀:

yeah the game has a lot to save so it takes some time, devs still try to improve it but it's never gonna be super fast there is just too much to save

Considering the state of all ingame "mechanics" Its just bad software engineering, that is what it is.

[Belteguesian]

It would be just excellent if the save file was 100MB!!! You can try it yourselves by disabling save ile compression in General Options.
With both DLC's the first (just as you load a new game) save is about 450MB (16 million plus change lines)!!!
Something that "might" help a bit is to stop indexing of the save directory (in Windows).

[Belteguesian]

Originally posted by ryak:

Considering the state of all ingame "mechanics" Its just bad software engineering, that is what it is.

The state of ingame mechanics is one thing, saving and saving time is another. Egosoft would have to abandon the "real time/real economy" idea in preference of playability, which is not going to happen in X4... X5 maybe... if there is one...