I think BG3 saves remember things like the position of every item you’ve ever left on the floor, because the entire world seems persistent. Which is cool, but it’s also a game where I have hundreds of saves. Maybe I should also check my save file size, come to think of it.
Comment on [deleted]
huey_m@reddthat.com 4 days ago
I know this is gonna sound like petty old guy complaints, but by God the save file sizes can be ridiculous! I have a smallish system drive that’s just for the OS, mainly, and have games and media installed on a few other chunky ones. I never bothered changing save file locations, because… save files, they don’t take up that much space, I’ve still got ~40GB or so to spare on the system drive, may as well leave it. Flash forward a few months after 3 of us have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m getting errors because there isn’t enough room on the system drive. Take a look on TreeSize for the culprit, and there’s BG3 taking up over 20GB of save files!
I get that it’s ultimately on me for not managing files better, but I honestly never even thought of save files eating up tens of GB of storage.
binarytobis@lemmy.world 4 days ago
tunetardis@piefed.ca 4 days ago
It wasn’t until I tried running a Pokémon game in an emulator that I realized how small a save file can be. They’re in the kilobytes range, even though they have to store all game play and achievements, inventory, every Pokémon you’ve ever captured with full stats and even those you’ve only seen, etc. It must be some binary format with absolutely no fat in it.
ramble81@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Probably do something stupid like individual bit fields for every possibility instead of a bit string. Or having it i a json wrapper for every single variable and combination, without any compression.
Thoguh save states in general grow more complicated as games become more complicated too. Think about early games, all you needed to track was… what level you were on, number of lives, and maybe a list of weapons.
Now you need things like the time of day in game, the weather, what interactions with other npcs you’ve had, multiple stats on every character in your party including customized outfits and accessories, etc. and just like the games themselves, they’re probably not using pointers but actual data too sometimes, which sucks.
too_high_for_this@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Crusader Kings III saves are insane. There’s like 50,000 characters and each one is unique. Appearance, age, weight, health, sexual preference, fertility, culture, religion, skills, traits, money, family/relationships, holdings, probably more that I’m forgetting.
And that’s just the characters. There’s also over 10,000 locations on the map with their own buildings, culture, faith, etc.