Most games never hit anywhere near that, but some large open world rpgs like Skyrim track the location of every single object in the game world. Like you can drop a piece of cheese on the bottom left corner of the map, come back 500 hours later, and it’ll still be there. now imagine all of the objects you’re buying and selling and manipulating over those hundreds of hours. Now add in a shit ton of script mods and other stuff that may add even more objects. And add in all of the quest data and interaction data that gets saved etc etc, and your save file can easily hit multiple gigabytes, with each file approaching 200mb.
Comment on Gog will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks agoThat’s insane, what’s making up all that data?
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
It still feels like it should be orders of magnitude less. For example, if each piece of cheese has an ID number that maps to cheese, an ID for what area it’s in, three coordinates for where exactly it is, and maybe a few more variables like how much of it you’ve eaten. Each of those variables is probably only a couple of bytes, so each item is probably only 20B or so, which means that even if you interacted with a million different items and there was no compression going on then that’s still only 20MB of save data.
vithigar@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Bold of you to assume the data in save files is packed binary and not something like JSON where { “x”: 13872, “y”: -17312, “z”: -20170 } requires 40 bytes of storage.
addie@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Agreed. JSON solves:
- the ‘versioning’ problem, where the data fields change after an update. That’s a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
- makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
- very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
- actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you’ve done the fast serialisation, anyway.
For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I’d probably never consider anything else.
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
That’s excusable in My First Game™ but surely professional AAAAA game would never cut corners and code something so lazily, eh?
tehevilone@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it’s not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.
It was a lot worse with Skyrim’s original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they’re most likely to have poor data management in some mod.
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Aha, so unexpectedly it’s bad/inefficient code that’s ultimately to blame
wax@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
Each object also needs the orientation, possibly also velocity and angular rates.
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Yeah that’s why I rounded up a bit. But even if there’s triple the amount of cheese data then a million cheeses is still only 60MB
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 3 weeks ago
Variables.
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Of course! But wouldn’t it save space if these variables used zeroes instead of ones?
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 3 weeks ago
They would remain 0 until flipped. They did say heavily modded, so like if you added more quests to the game, these all need some way of knowing what legs have been completed. The more modded quests completed, the bigger the save. And that’s just for one thing that a save would keep track of.
Daxtron2@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
Poor optimization of save files probably
smeg@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Must be, if there’s no real limit then why would they bother?