Slow Saving

[Ixnatifual]

I was wondering why. Thanks for the explanation. It still saves reasonably fast on my system. Maybe 3 seconds or so, but indeed that is much slower than LoG1. But no problem for me at least.

[aaneton]

I guess this is where SSD comes handy, saves for me are probably 1-2 sec, also loading times are abit longer than LoG1 but not much.

[Eldur]

...

So, going with the big saved games was a definite improvement from a developer's standpoint even though it has its disadvantages. I hope this clarifies the situation a little.

I think that's great, nothing is worse than a broken save due to patches

But still I'm wondering why it takes a 2-3 second freeze to write under 2MB onto a SSD... I believe it's not what is saved, but rather how it's saved. I've played games with bigger save files (5-10MB) that don't freeze at all when saving, even on HDD. I'd be glad if this could be optimized, but well, it isn't a very big deal either.

[AsgarZigel]

@Eldur: I'd guess it's "constructing" the save file from the game-state that takes so long, not the saving itself.

Where it gets really annoying for me is reloading a save after a game over, especially in harder areas when it happens multiple times. Is there nothing that could be done to speed it up? Maybe an option to hold the latest save in memory?

It is interesting that everything is dynamic for modding puropses though. Does that mean you could make scripts that change the map itself, like letting the player dig out dungeons or build walls?

[antti]

It is interesting that everything is dynamic for modding puropses though. Does that mean you could make scripts that change the map itself, like letting the player dig out dungeons or build walls?

Yep, this should be possible, although it will take some effort from the modder's side that correct wall and pillar objects are placed in the newly digged out areas and that old objects are cleaned up nicely.

[Obyvvatel]

What about quicksaves, because they cause the game to crash, unlike regular saves. The same thing goes with life crystals.

[eLPuSHeR]

By the way... why are the savegames compressed? Shouldn't be faster and less problematic just saving them in uncompressed form?.

[minmay]

Grimrock 2's saves would be about 4 times larger if not compressed - about 6.5 MB each for the standard dungeon. That doesn't seem less problematic to me.
And zlib is pretty fast, it takes my computer less than half a second to decompress and re-compress a save. Since it takes several seconds to save in the actual game, I suspect most of the time is spent in some other aspect of serialization rather than the compression.

[eLPuSHeR]

You are right, ZLIB is pretty fast.