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 1 year ago[deleted]
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
smeg@feddit.uk 1 year ago
[deleted]vithigar@lemmy.ca 1 year 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 1 year 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.
tehevilone@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
wax@feddit.nu 1 year ago
Each object also needs the orientation, possibly also velocity and angular rates.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Variables.
smeg@feddit.uk 1 year ago
[deleted]Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year 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 1 year ago
Poor optimization of save files probably