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.
vithigar@lemmy.ca 5 months 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 5 months ago
Agreed. JSON solves:
For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I’d probably never consider anything else.
cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 5 months ago
protobuf does all of these (well, except compression which you dont need)
smeg@feddit.uk 5 months ago
That’s excusable in My First Game™ but surely professional AAAAA game would never cut corners and code something so lazily, eh?
vithigar@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
It’s not really laziness. Storing as JSON solves or prevents a lot of problems you could run into with something bespoke and “optimally packed”, you just have the tradeoff of needing more storage for it. Even then, the increased storage can be largely mitigated with compression. JSON compresses very well.
The problem is usually what they’re storing, not how they’re storing it. For example, The Witcher (first one) has ~20MB save files. These are mostly a bespoke packed binary format, but contain things like raw strings of descriptions in multiple localisations for items being carried, and complete descriptors of game quests. Things that should just be ID values that point to that data in the game files. It also leads with like… 13KB of zero-padding for some reason.
smeg@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Good points!
cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 5 months ago
looking at you x3
and rimworld