Save and load time on game?

[Xhawk]

Nothing to be done to improve this at all ?


This game i use
to load game from windows 1min28sec
to load savegame 1min 55 sec (first time load from running game from windows)
To save a game take 22sec

I use win10 and ssd - and the world is new, so i do not have more then 1 ship.

I feel like i use floppy in the old days.. after many hundre hours ingame this starting to get on my nerve..

[Duke Flapjack]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Bozz 💀:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Duke Flapjack:

Hey, ever played Rimworld? That game literally takes about 5 to 10 minutes for the game to START because of all the stuff it has to load. Be patient, dude!

I have 300 mods in rimworld, starting the game takes 20 minutes

Sound like me. The only reason it takes me 10 minutes is because I load it off of an SSD.

[calabacina]

no mods, potato pc and looooong loading times. sometimes when I exit from the game it freeze my pc for a few minutes.

[Duke Flapjack]

Well, it has to load an entire galaxy and everything in it down to their exact location. Try doing any save-game edits. Notepad++ takes forever to load it all.

[calabacina]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Duke Flapjack:

Well, it has to load an entire galaxy and everything in it down to their exact location. Try doing any save-game edits. Notepad++ takes forever to load it all.

please explain mOAR!

[Papasaurus Rex]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Calabacina:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Duke Flapjack:

Well, it has to load an entire galaxy and everything in it down to their exact location. Try doing any save-game edits. Notepad++ takes forever to load it all.

please explain mOAR!

Basically, there are a crap ton of in game assets spread out all over the X universe and all of these items must load in the same spot they were upon saving, meaning it take a bit longer to save or load the game.

Last part is just moving the save game contents over to a notepad in order to see the code for all of the stuff going on.

[Gregorovitch]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Calabacina:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Duke Flapjack:

Well, it has to load an entire galaxy and everything in it down to their exact location. Try doing any save-game edits. Notepad++ takes forever to load it all.

please explain mOAR!

If you compare X4 to an open world game like Skyrim, in Skyrim the game only loads full details of what the player can see around them plus the immediately surrounding areas (it pre-loads the next bit's in each direction for you to avoid loading pauses). The rest of the game world stays on disk until it's needed. X4 loads every single station, ship, asteroid whatever in the game to make the whole clockwork universe run lock, stock and barrel in real time.

If you compare X4 to another real time game that does load the entire game world, Stellaris for example, Stellaris has a maybe 1000 star systems on the map, maybe a couple of hundred individual fleets. X4 starts with 6000 individual ships plus 1000 faction stations. Additionally Stellaris does not have to render detailed 3D models of everything in close up like X4. X4 has much more detail for each ship and station. Additionally X4 has far more information about each ship and station than Stellaris has. Not just what it's made of, also exactly where it's going and what it's doing. How many lumps of ore a miner's got in it's hold for example. X4 therefore has a crap ton more data to load and save than Stellaris does so naturally it takes a longer to save and load it.

[偷桃]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ivan71hfml27:

Dudes. Devs still use XML serialisation but they actually serialise like hundred of megabytes (200 or 300, idk how much exactly). XML not works good with this. Also they don't seem to use multithreading on load or save. That's probably because they haven't touched serialisation at all since X3 but things to save increased drastically.

This is EXACTLY the issue! And that's why only hardware can help improve the status a little bit.

We just can't serialize large amount of binary data in text format as a single XML and then zip it. The amount of useless tokens written to the XML text is just huge, and cannot do any multi-threading. It takes long time to read/write and long time to compress / decompress.

Most of the games have their own custom binary format to optimize the load and save, since the amount of data is pretty fixed. Even if the developer doesn't want to invent their own wheel, or because the data size is hard to be predefined, they can use some better common stuff. There are still many better choices out there like Google Protobuf. Even using JSON is better than XML.

XML probably is the worst ever choice for this purpose since they are not going to perform any save data interchange with external parties with SOAP and don't need to do old school stuff like XPATH search or XSLT to transform the doc to something else.

Even though I purchased the game for long time, unfortunately this is basically the key reason stopping me from further playing the game.

[hajes29a]

Windows SSD performance is joke, and very little changed in last 10 years ever since SSD arrived.

They are trying to improve it by Storage API in Win 11.

Linux loading times are not better despite I have one of fastest SSD on Earth (WD SN850 or Corsair MP600)

It is still joke considering both, above by mentioned, SSD/NVMe can write sustainably at least 1300MB/s - my compressed saves are about 150MB now. It should be done in no time even if uncompressed size is 500MB...maybe.

there is something else that slows down process of saving/loading

[happypumpkin]

Based on my experience, it's CPU or maybe ram
Just changed from a i7 3770k to a i5 12600. ram 32gb ddr3 to ddr5. Same old 7000rpm HDD and same old video card. Load/Save times dramatically improved. Load used to be ~10 mins and now its ~1. Save time used to be ~1 min now its <10sec.

*The save these values are for is end game. The file size for the save is approx 900MB. Has CoL/SV dlc, all sectors explored, most factions allied, 817 ships, 50 stations.

[Bozz 💀]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย happypumpkin:

Based on my experience, it's CPU or maybe ram
Just changed from a i7 3770k to a i5 12600. ram 32gb ddr3 to ddr5. Same old 7000rpm HDD and same old video card. Load/Save times dramatically improved. Load used to be ~10 mins and now its ~1. Save time used to be ~1 min now its <10sec.

*The save these values are for is end game. The file size for the save is approx 900MB. Has CoL/SV dlc, all sectors explored, most factions allied, 817 ships, 50 stations.

exactly same experiance as yo changes for a 12th Gen cpu and better ram and my loading and saving time has decreased a lot

[ZombieHunter]

I'm on SSD and my save takes quite a bit of time to load and also save over the top of as well.

[Metradon]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Papasaurus Rex:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ivan71hfml27:

Dudes. Devs still use XML serialisation but they actually serialise like hundred of megabytes (200 or 300, idk how much exactly). XML not works good with this. Also they don't seem to use multithreading on load or save. That's probably because they haven't touched serialisation at all since X3 but things to save increased drastically.

So is that what Total war games are doing wrong, they haven't upgraded in 10-15 years? Cmon man

Hahaha, probably but I'm not a software engineer with knowledge on database design. My WH2 load/save times are pretty bad (even on an m.2) for what the game is.

[hajes29a]

it doesn't matter what HW you have it still loads for ages.

I have relativelly small imperium of about 3B worth...about 100 ships, 5 stations...it takes like 5 minutes to load game with fastest IO HW on Earth.

X570 chipset, AMD Ryzen 9 3950X @4GHz, 32-128GB RAM (no difference, maybe RAMdisk helps if you are willing to lose it all in case of crash), NVMe WD SN850 or Corsair MP600 (no matter still same crap in Win 10, Win 11 may be better once EgoSoft adds StorageAPI), Sapphire RX6800XT

B550 chipset same as above by...no difference in load times.

I even played X4 in Ubuntu Linux with above by HW where you have no bottlenecks known in WinOS such as crap storage IO or memory bandwidth...it is simply poorly coded. What EgoSoft didn't fix for years for some weird reason. Maybe it suppose to force you to think and not reload screw ups (well, once devs fix suicide tendencies of AI fleets...we won't need to reload anymore...I just lost yesterday two carriers and one destroyer to poorly equiped XEN carrier...just because AI ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "recalled subordinates" and waited to be killed or just flown around without deploying 20 fighters inside the docks...it makes you think who programmed such a crap).

Unless, you have some old-school HW...there will be little difference in loading game...no matter whether SSD or NVMe (there is really little difference thanks to Micosoft that woke up last year, and started to develop StorageAPI to finally utilize SSD tech that is with us for at least 15 years).

[Bozz 💀]

I have a 1k hour long save, IOn my last year setup it took like 8 minutes to load, on my new setup it takes around 3m to load so I thing it's kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what you say ^^

I changed mostly cpu and ram no new SSD or anything, not really sure what helped but it did help a lot

best is rimworld, last year setup took like 15 minutes to load and now it's like 2 minutes xD