Save Frequency

[Vegas Doc]

Soooo..... I experience lag during the auto-save process in experimental (Update 8.0.) Not being a big fan of lag, I decreased the frequency of the auto-saves from the default five minute interval to a twenty minute interval, thinking that won't be too bad, every twenty minutes. However, I noticed that the duration of the decreased frequency (20 minute intervals) resulted in longer lag duration for the auto-save to complete. Let's say it took X seconds to complete with the default frequency, by decreasing it to every twenty minutes it seemed like it took 4X seconds for the auto-save to complete. How's the save file work? The more stuff you changed, then more changes to the file must be made, with no change taking no time, and changes taking a few milliseconds kind of process, compare the old file to the new conditions? Any ideas? Happy Pioneering!

P.S. My current save file size is 6.753 Kb, and at the start of the game the file size was only 249 Kb, I've had file sizes over 2 Mb before, maybe even a GB? nah! that's ridiculous for a save file. But, that shouldn't be the cause, because the auto-saves are very close to each other in size, resulting in similar file sizes as the previous save, not weeks apart.

ADDED an explanation:

Some people might be confused when I say I decrease frequency of the auto saves, it might be confusing to say that five minute intervals is a higher frequency, than that of twenty minute intervals, 5>20 right. but when we talk about frequency, it's how often something happens, so if there is a longer period between events, then it has a lower frequency.

The earth takes twenty-four hours to complete a rotation (1 Day), if it took only twenty then that would be a higher frequency, or if it took 30 hours that would be a lower frequency for each day to complete. 30 hours is a lower frequency, and 20 is a higher frequency.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

Origineel geplaatst door Vegas Doc:

How large is your save file now?

Do you consider the problem solved?

First question:
I've never search for or looked at my savefiles

Second question:
There are two kinds of freezes
- one kind is the autosavegames freeze (half a second)
- the other kind are the mini-freezes during normal gameplay, fractions of a seconds, really short. I decreased many graphical settings and look that my browser is closed, since then I didn't notice the mini-freezings. That that depends also on my state of mind: When I am over-stimulated my inner filter is switched off and I notice much more visual and accustical things.

EDIT: I enabled autosave again (20 minutes interval), but just as a CONTROL TOOL that will indicated me when something went awry. In other words:

Should the autosave suddenly freeze much longer I will go back to my last or second or third last manual savegame (so long back till the autosave will be the usual half second again)

Origineel geplaatst door info:

If you are not experiencing crashing then 120 minutes is not issue. If you are though a lot of work can be lost with an interval that long unless you develop the habit of saving manually after any particularly long spell of construction to ensure never having to redo massive complicated chunks of your Factory.

It never crashes.

And yes, I save when I expose myself on a clip or nomansland with auto-health-reduction or when I try something and I give my savegames different names.
And no, I will not use autosaves animore, not after all what I've read here.

[info]

Minimal impact on the landscape can save some amount on the save file. I dont really know how much that is and I suppose it has much to do with just how much ipact you make but every tree/bush/powerslug/animal/piece of wood laying on the ground is tacked onto the save file as in "Full pristine map - this tree, this power slug, this bush" as I read how it works so sure belts and machines will account for a load but you can also add a incredible amount by clearing the map so it stands to reason the impact is real.

Seems like it would be better to have it more like "This is the whole map" and simply remove what is removed in gameplay from that instead of saying tree at x.x has been cut down in addition to the whole map. Performance would actually get better as the map was cleared that way.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

Origineel geplaatst door info:

Minimal impact on the landscape can save some amount on the save file. I dont really know how much that is and I suppose it has much to do with just how much ipact you make but every tree/bush/powerslug/animal/piece of wood laying on the ground is tacked onto the save file as in "Full pristine map - this tree, this power slug, this bush" as I read how it works so sure belts and machines will account for a load but you can also add a incredible amount by clearing the map so it stands to reason the impact is real.

Seems like it would be better to have it more like "This is the whole map" and simply remove what is removed in gameplay from that instead of saying tree at x.x has been cut down in addition to the whole map. Performance would actually get better as the map was cleared that way.

It's no fun if you are afraid of building things. I encourage myself to still build all pipelines and belts up, then do the horizontal distance I need, and then build them down. So that I can comfortably walk instead of climbing over things. Of course this makes 3 pipeline instead of 1 pipeline and two lifts and a belt instead of one belt. Whatever, it is a game and I wanna enjoy it and not develop a mental fear disorder. I hope when I manually save and only load that that I am save.

BTW:
I really cleared all the grassland where I started. Not weed is left, and I kept just a few trees. And I blew up every single rock and stone. Would that make my savegame bigger or smaller?

Now in the other areas of the world I just use my big lawnmower to kill all the bushes but I try hard to not kill trees. I have many savegames called like "blasting operations and trees" or "blasting operations and mushrooms" or "blasting operations and cactus". When I accidentally blow up a tree or mushroom or cactus while removing a rock or stone I go back to my last manual savegame.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

You could say that till I got my High-Speed-Lawnmower AKA Explorer gardening is a new hobby of mine.

I like the idea that with every weed and bush mowed my game gets faster and savegames smaller

[Doc✪Hollywood]

It's also kind of a hobby of mine to reach with my beloved Explorer all kind of possible and impossible locations

no weed is is in a safe place I get everywhere

To boldly go where no lawnmower has gone before!

[info]

What I read is that everything removed from the map is added to save file as

Whole map + this tree gone, this rock gone ect....

So that would seem to make the file larger.

I may have not interpreted it correctly as it seems a bad way to track things when they could just be removed from the database entirely.

[Mister Fabulous]

The record for a tree/rock doesn't exist in the save file until its removed. New world save files are tiny. If you had a new empty world with all the foliage removed, the file would be considerably larger.

It's similar for items on belts. Every single one is an entity that needs to be saved. If you build belt highways across the entire map, that's hundreds of thousands of entities that need to be saved.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

Origineel geplaatst door info:

What I read is that everything removed from the map is added to save file as

Whole map + this tree gone, this rock gone ect....

So that would seem to make the file larger.

I may have not interpreted it correctly as it seems a bad way to track things when they could just be removed from the database entirely.

Where did you read that?
Would be a very painstaking way of saving things. Why not modify the map/world you load at every gamestart instead of writing all things to savegames and blowing them up like blowfishs?

But removing weed and brushes speeds up at least the graphics and without them you see much better and orientate yourself easier.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

Origineel geplaatst door Mister Fabulous:

The record for a tree/rock doesn't exist in the save file until its removed. New world save files are tiny. If you had a new empty world with all the foliage removed, the file would be considerably larger.

It's similar for items on belts. Every single one is an entity that needs to be saved. If you build belt highways across the entire map, that's hundreds of thousands of entities that need to be saved.

Darn!
Are you sure of that? Source?
I find that not an ideal way of saving especially when saving freezes the game.

Are you saying that Trucks and Drones are better than long belts savegame-wise?
And does it matter if it is one long belt or three short belts with the same total length? With splitters/mergers you can splice belts together. So does that matter much or is it more what is on the belt transported that adds much to the savegame?


I just lawnmowed a good half day and thought I did something good.
Now that I read that my good mood swaps to a bad mood.

I see that my savegame got today 130 KB larger. That is a lot for a day. My average was +58 KB per day.

My savegame is now 3112 KB, I play since 58 days while playing a total of 399 hours (displayed inside Satisfactory, not in Steam which displays more).
So that would be + 7.8 KB savegame per hour and as mentioned +58 KB per day.

But I'ver never built much, I was more exploring the world, updating the map and lawnmowing weed and brushes. Just recently begun to build iron and steel process lines and a petro industry. And I was happy about it.

Now that I read more and more unfortunate news (about getting out of hand savegame sizes with corresponding screen-freeze times) should I try in future to keep my belts as short as possible? And maybe pipelines too? Not build them up and down with lifts, just straight? Not building long belts but order trucks and drones when they become avaibable?

I find this quite damping the fun factor of the game if you have to worry about bits and bytes whenever you construct or mow a thing.

[Vegas Doc]

@DocHollywood> I think that you might be over-thinking the save file process too much, it's taking the fun out of the game for you. My Gosh, you surely don't want to worry about saving file space by running over one bush with an explorer!

First of all, we aren't even sure if any of this information is true or not, we're not sure of how the save process is really done, we're not experts, we're more like detectives ... we are just trying stuff out to see if it helps solve the problem or not, then reporting it to those of us with the same issue. I for one surely thank you for your feedback, i'm not the only one that thinks it's a problem. I don't want you to lose any love for the game over it though, but it does sound like you're still having a little bit of fun investigating, so that's OK I guess. Happy Pioneering!

Dad Joke: Since you're DocHollywood and I'm Vegas Doc...it reminds me of a joke from the Navy (Navy Corpsman) ...What do you call two Docs on the Discussion Board? (pause) A pair of Docs (paradox).. sigh.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

Origineel geplaatst door Vegas Doc:

@DocHollywood> I think that you might be over-thinking the save file process too much, it's taking the fun out of the game for you. My Gosh, you surely don't want to worry about saving file space by running over one bush with an explorer!

First of all, we aren't even sure if any of this information is true or not, we're not sure of how the save process is really done, we're not experts, we're more like detectives ... we are just trying stuff out to see if it helps solve the problem or not, then reporting it to those of us with the same issue. I for one surely thank you for your feedback, i'm not the only one that thinks it's a problem. I don't want you to lose any love for the game over it though, but it does sound like you're still having a little bit of fun investigating, so that's OK I guess. Happy Pioneering!

Dad Joke: Since you're DocHollywood and I'm Vegas Doc...it reminds me of a joke from the Navy (Navy Corpsman) ...What do you call two Docs on the Discussion Board? (pause) A pair of Docs (paradox).. sigh.

I don't understand the joke but I appreciate that you try to comfort me.



I also have a few questions for you - if you don't mind.
- how many hours has your current game (in the game displayed at bottom left)?
- how big are your last manual savegame?
- how big your last autosave?
- how long does it take midgame to destroy current session and load your last manual savegame?


As for me to give you the same informations:
- I cant find the autosaves
- destroying and loading last manual savegame takes 18 seconds. The savegame from one day before takes only 16 seconds. Measured both 5 times. Thats a +2 seconds
- the rest I already wrote above

[Vegas Doc]

@DocHollywood, it was a dumb joke anyways, two doctors is a pair, a pair of docs, sounds like paradox ( definition - a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.)

The autosaves are named " what you named your game"_autosave_0 to autosave_2 (total of three files) then write over them in a cycle with a timestamp. Located on your hard drive in the same folder as your manual saves:

C: users/ your last name/appdata ( this folder might be hidden )/Local/FactoryGame/Saved/SaveGames/ "a big number like 1234567891011/ (it's your licence number I think)

I'm using beta (experimental) version, but started a new game now and have only about 20hrs so far, I took it to the endgame using SCIM interactive to get there with only the HUB, about twenty containers, MAM, and basic buildings for iron, copper, and concrete built with a very small file size of just over 200 Kb, testing to see if it was the level causing it, because it usually occurs around that time in previous saves for me, but it's acting just fine now, but the file size is 1312Kb, running well, without issues. There was an unannounced patch today, but they said they were working on the backend in a notification, it happened around that time for me.

Problem game was around 203hr 17min or more
Last manual saved game for that game size was: 5337 Kb
It's last autosave was the same: 5337 Kb (that makes sense)
Time to load last manual save (just a guess, didn't time it) a few seconds (5-6 sec?)

My problem was while playing the game and during autosaves, it would stop the game for several minutes during the process, freezing me and everything around me for a long time maybe 40 sec, then lagged what seemed like about 90 secs or more, then free up then would repeat that at the next autosave, I only have had a few crashes, think they were server related, nothing to do with this problem.

[info]

Well it took me awhile to find this (again as links were requested last time this was being discussed) but here is what the Wiki says about Biomass.

https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Biomass

"Trivia
Over-harvest of biomass in the game has significant impact on the game performance, and more noticeable on client side. Biomass can be refer to any trees chopped down, any flower or bushes picked up, including small rocks and stones that can be destroyed. The game stores the complete map including all trees and others as the "default" state. For every single entity removed from the environment, the game has to save the additional information for that removal.
For example, if 100 trees are chopped down, then the map state will be stated as "Default map with all trees + tree 1 chopped down + tree 2 chopped down + ... + tree 100 chopped down".
For client side, ghost trees can often be seen, because the default map is loaded first, and the data with tree removal can take some time to load. And for client side, the stats of environment is not updated until the client interact with it."

[Doc✪Hollywood]

Origineel geplaatst door Vegas Doc:

@DocHollywood
Time to load last manual save (just a guess, didn't time it) a few seconds (5-6 sec?)

I actually wanted to write you the same "it takes a few seconds". But when I stopped the time it was 18 seconds. After one day gardening (destroying biomass) and building some factories and belts the loading time went up from 16 seconds to 18 seconds. That's heavy. Imagine: After 30 days it would be +60 seconds loading time.

Would you mind to 1x stop the time for destroying current session and loading this 5000KB savegame midgame? I would appreciate it. I can not imagine it takes really only 5-6 seconds - or something with my rig or savegame is not okay.

The game never crashed for me. I play singleplayer so that probably doesn't include a server side.

Origineel geplaatst door info:

Well it took me awhile to find this
https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Biomass

I appreciate the effort you've done for me. Thank you.

Origineel geplaatst door info:

The game stores the complete map including all trees and others as the "default" state. For every single entity removed from the environment, the game has to save the additional information for that removal.

That is so stupid. They should update the map - since you load it at every gamestart anyway - with every removed entity the map file should get smaller . And not store this in a ever growing savegame. That is certainly somethign they **can** improve.[/quote]

Origineel geplaatst door info:

For client side, ghost trees can often be seen

Didn't see one yet.

As long a savegame is smaller than the SSD cache everything is fine - I guess. Problems probably start when you step over this line.

[Vegas Doc]

MAYBE MY MATH IS OFF?

@info >The thing is...today's computers are very fast, even an old "potato" with CPU speed of 2GHz can process quite a bit of information extremely fast. So, if the map of the world containing all the information of every little piece in the game were say 8Km X 8Km with blocks made by the UE5 (Unreal Engine) was 255 quads by 255 quads ( a huge map) or 66K quads, and information was stored in 64 bit memory blocks somewhere in memory with changes going on as you played, it would take the potato CPU about:

Total bits to be processed every clock cycle:
66K quads * 64 bits= 4,096,000 bits of information for each cycle
Speed: 2GHz/sec = 0.002 sec, that's pretty fast 2ms (milliseconds or 1/2,000 of a second)

NOTE: Graphic memory is even faster if it's done in the GPU

@DocHollywood>
The bottleneck is always writing the data to the disk, fortunately I have a SSD which is much faster 500Mb/ sec compared to 30Mb/sec.

So, even if the memory block (RAM) of the map was 1,000 times that size it would take .2 sec to read by the potato CPU. But.. it takes my rig about 6 sec to read the 5Mb file so it's probably verifying, read/write, and other computer stuff.

Why is there a difference in time to complete virtually the same task performed by an autosave as a manual save? Or... is it just my imagination? it takes the same amount of time.

UPDATED STUFF
UE5 INFO
The UE5 Landscape interface for creating New Landscapes is limited to a maximum of 8161x8161, the same as UE4, when manually creating a new terrain. To create terrains larger than 8km x 8km requires that you import an XY Tile Set.

New Perimeters:
8161 X 8161 quads=66,601,921 quads at 64 bits each =4,262,522,944 bits, but they say they only keep track of the block you're in which I guessed was probably 255 X 255 quads or 66,000 quads, 32 grids (8161/255).