v4 save load times

[Zafaron]

I still have issues with this game taking a long time to save. (25 seconds or so late in the game)

Is there any reason why Egosoft has chosen not to go with async file saving? Presumably you would just write async in the background while the game continued on playing without the long interruption. It would require two different places to keep up with game data so the one that's currently being saved would stop updating until the save operation finished, and the other data could keep getting updated as per usual and then sync back up with the data to be written to disk after it finished saving.

[xant]

25 Seconds in lategame? Wow, that's quite fast!

[Zafaron]

25 Seconds in lategame? Wow, that's quite fast!

I run a ram cache on my SSD so it's mostly just waiting on the CPU.

[zakaluka]

Wasn't there at one point a more detailed dev reply on this subject, early after 1.0 release? Saying something to the effect of, saving requires traversing the entire universe's data, and it's fundamentally a big task? We can't easily change that because, game optimization?

I did a quick look for what I'm recalling (vaguely) but my google-fu is failing me.

Here it is, well, once anyway. Mods, when providing history, maybe add this one to the pile - it's really the core reason. Look for CBJ's response.
viewtopic.php?p=4930526

If the game state is a giant graph with random pointers everywhere you're very likely to spend comparable amount of time "just" copying it, to traversing it for saving. You can't simply copy a blob of memory and call it done when all the contents that you've copied still refer to the original "live" version all over the place.

This is basically it. The game's "live" state is, and needs to be, optimised for running the game, not for saving it, so there are lots and lots of pointers and other things that you can't just copy and expect to still work. Serialisation has to be done as part of a deep traversal of the live data, and doing that on multiple threads would be pretty impractical (at least for the bulk of the data). Compression and writing to disk are the only parts that could, in theory, be threaded and done once the game has been unpaused, but then you run the risk of finding out that the process failed after the game has carried on being played. That wouldn't be good!

Certainly in my last reply (over in tech support) I came off as argumentative. I also don't have much patience for this topic, I suppose. But it's because of what the designers said: there are a few things we could do to shave a couple seconds off, but it's too much effort. As to a bigger overhaul of how data is represented in memory to make the whole process faster? We won't do it; anything like that sacrifices game performance.

With a reply like that from the designer, this topic is a complete non-starter. Meaning, you're not likely to get meaningful engagement from the dev team by bringing it up again and again.

[rmoore]

I can live with the long save time, but would much prefer it if the game stayed paused after saving so I can go off and put the kettle on without returning to find my entire business operation obliterated by the Xenon

[Alan Phipps]

I can live with the long save time, but would much prefer it if the game stayed paused after saving so I can go off and put the kettle on without returning to find my entire business operation obliterated by the Xenon

That I can agree with, and for loading too (where you already have to unlock the flight controls and reacquire any target, and so unpausing is not much of a further chore and the paused state might even help).

About the only time I can see a lasting pause perhaps being less welcome is after an autosave while you are in the middle of doing something a bit tricky.

[bubbabenali]

is 18 seconds really that long for a game where you are waiting days to build stuff and play for 1000 of hours

As a member of the min-max er-clan let me tell you it sometimes takes me hours to tune a single module; Thanks to RNGesus and long loadingtimes.

[bubbabenali]

I can live with the long save time, but would much prefer it if the game stayed paused after saving so I can go off and put the kettle on without returning to find my entire business operation obliterated by the Xenon

You can push the pause button while saving and loading, the game recognizes button presses and executes them after the operation.

[Old Drullo321]

I guess the loading times themselves are justified and not the problem. Forcing the player to reload countless time because of introducing MMO gameplay elements via RNG with ship modifications is a design issue that could easily be solved by either just giving auto-max values or max-values that are ~80% of the current maximum values.

[GCU Grey Area]

I guess the loading times themselves are justified and not the problem. Forcing the player to reload countless time because of introducing MMO gameplay elements via RNG with ship modifications is a design issue that could easily be solved by either just giving auto-max values or max-values that are ~80% of the current maximum values.

No one is forcing you to reload in such circumstances - that is entirely your choice. For many of the mods the minimum values are still fairly decent. For example, tend to give all of my freighters Reaver engines & for that application even the minimum +35% travel mode is perfectly acceptable, don't consider it worth the additional expenditure to get them closer to the max +45%. When it's ships I'll be flying myself & I do want better results I just accept that it's intended that this can cost considerably more than just settling for the first results. If nothing else re-rolling is a hell of a lot quicker than reloading. Why not just accept that if you want the best out of your mods you have to pay a lot for them, rather than doing a lot of cheesy reloading?

[rmoore]

I can live with the long save time, but would much prefer it if the game stayed paused after saving so I can go off and put the kettle on without returning to find my entire business operation obliterated by the Xenon

You can push the pause button while saving and loading, the game recognizes button presses and executes them after the operation.

Thanks for the heads up mate, I had been pausing the game using the Esc key up until now. I only just realised you can use the pause button which does a "live" pause letting you still issue commands while paused.

Saving while paused via the pause key and not Esc does indeed leave the game paused after saving.

Gotta love the size of this franchise, you learn something new every day

[Alan Phipps]

... as do I.

EDIT: Trying it out on a reload, if you press pause before the loading initialisation finishes then the screen immediately shows paused but the game is not paused after the reload. If you press pause during the quotation or when the loading % roundabout is spinning then nothing seems to happen immediately but the game is indeed paused on reloading. Just sharing this in case it helps somebody.

[surferx]

I've played other sim games where I would literally hold my breath loading a save because I wasn't sure it was not going to be corrupted. And many times they were lost.
After loading hundreds to maybe thousands of saved games in X4, I remember 1 or 2? that did not load correctly and I had to use an earlier save. I'm very willing to sacrifice a few seconds of game play to ensure a clean save. As far as the save game file this game is gold. Complaining over an 18 second save and 75 second game load is typical of more and more of today's gamers who have so short of an attention span, they are constantly in need of a Thing to keep their short attention on before moving on to the next Thing while checking likes on social media and simultaneously binge streaming some show. It's the "Are we there yet?" generation. Please just breathe, relax enjoy the game and seriously, consider yourself lucky you don't have to worry about losing every tenth save.

[dtpsprt]

I've played other sim games where I would literally hold my breath loading a save because I wasn't sure it was not going to be corrupted. And many times they were lost.
After loading hundreds to maybe thousands of saved games in X4, I remember 1 or 2? that did not load correctly and I had to use an earlier save. I'm very willing to sacrifice a few seconds of game play to ensure a clean save. As far as the save game file this game is gold. Complaining over an 18 second save and 75 second game load is typical of more and more of today's gamers who have so short of an attention span, they are constantly in need of a Thing to keep their short attention on before moving on to the next Thing while checking likes on social media and simultaneously binge streaming some show. It's the "Are we there yet?" generation. Please just breathe, relax enjoy the game and seriously, consider yourself lucky you don't have to worry about losing every tenth save.

I'm not part of the "Are we there yet?" generation (far be it) and I do understand the reasons behind the abhorrent save/load times. Still, seeing that reality had to take a huge step back going against playability in many cases, I am really not so sure that these save/load times are justified to exist.
"Total" reality has a bad effect, especially with people with organised minds and proactive approach. To put it in Dal Busta's words: "If you study a situation long enough, you can account for everything, even madmen". This means that the game gets too predictable, even to the point that the "path ahead" gets really boring, especially since the story plots all boil down to "how much money" the player has.