Please improve save/load times

[Caiburn]

Hi,

Recently bought the game's "Planets" edition (only played the original X back in the days) and enjoying the first baby steps except for one thing.
The load/save times are extremely annoying, especially in the beginning when you learn the ropes and save/load a lot.

My PC (Win10, i7 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, Nvidia 1070) only uses SSDs (Samsung EVO), the game runs perfectly without any obvious errors.

Cheers!

[CBJ]

I've moved this out of Tech Support. It's more of a feature request, and you've not provided any of the information that could be used to help you with a Tech Support issue anyway. That said, the game's saving and loading times are as fast as they are ever likely to be, having been optimised and improved several times. With both processes now taking advantage of multi-threading, there is not much more that can be done. The game will take longer to load than the average game, because the entire game universe needs to be processed, not just the current level as in most games. However, you've not stated what times you are currently seeing or provided a DXDiag, so it's hard to say whether the times you are getting are "normal" for the hardware you have. Maybe if you were to provide that info, we could see whether there are any improvements you could gain at your end.

And before anyone chimes in with "it's slow because it uses XML", no, it's not. The file format has nothing to do with it.

[Caiburn]

Hi CBJ,

Cheers for chiming in. My current fresh Terran start, 3 missions in, clocks in at 1 minute 16 seconds on a quickload.

If this "is as it is", then so be it - I understand the amount of data being processed (500MB of data takes a while to serialize, regardless of XML, JSON, binary or whatever, especially with sparse complex data structures).
I also understand that the game has been out for quite a while and toying with something as central as load/save is hard.

In hindsight please see the post as an annoyed knee-jerk reaction maybe. Such a complex game with so little explanations leading to so many possible mistakes with long reloads...I hope you understand.

[dtpsprt]

Actually the time you have stated is within the "normal" times. For faster save/load times you'll have to change your cpu!!! One thing that might (emphasis on might) improve your times is disabling the indexing service in "Documents", where your save files are. Such an action will make you to optimise your hard rive sooner than "normal", maybe every 10-15 days...

[Scoob]

Can I ask which exact i7 you have? I have a 2600k i7 and it really struggles with stuff now. A friends 12700k i7 on the other hand, is pretty darn good.

Note: the 2600k is not my main gaming machine any more, but was also paired with a GTX 1070, 32GB DDR3 1600 and fast SSD's in RAID0 when X4 came out. An old CPU like that is really gonna struggle.

On my current rig - all "last gen" - 5800X3d, RTX 3070, 32GB DDR4 3600, 2x M.2 NVMe in RAID0, a mature game (with mods) will load in about 10-20 seconds. Sooooo much better than it was.

Basically, its not the game as such - even though it is doing a lot of work to instance the game universe from a save - as better hardware can make a huge difference. I imagine those sat on 13900k's / 7800X3d's using DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 SSD's have an ever better experience than me.

[jlehtone]

The save/load times of current version are actually clearly "better" than what they were couple versions ago.

[Duncaroos]

A few versions ago, I would agree with OP. The newest updates though save/load times are WAY faster than what it used to be.

[Daemonjax]

The time it takes to save the game is very similar on both my 10700k and my 3570k (just a handful of seconds)... so it's probably a single threaded operation (or at least it doesn't significantly benefit from more than 4 cores) to save the entire game's state, and it's cpu-bound -- not I/O bound... in order to have each savegame file have a reasonable size. Remember that the save algorithm has to walk-over the entire current state of the game universe and everything in it in order to load it back exactlly as it was. They're probably already cutting some corners on that aspect (like probably oos civilian ship spawns). And likewise for the load function... it's not i/o bound.

The speed of the drive shouldn't realkly have any effect on save speed because the write will be cached anyways.

EDIT: Oh, and on my 3570k I had 32gb ram and so I had to put most of the game's files on a 16gb ramdrive to have any benefit from all the ram because this game breaks windows filecaching... at least for me, anyways. So that might've affected my load/save speed to some extent, who knows. I haven't bothered doing that with these nvme drives on my newer pc (even though it also has 32gb and so 16gb goes completely unutilized by this game).

[Skeeter]

I think i fresh start on my old 3570k with normal ssd and 16gb of ddr3 1600hz was about 18 seconds to save a game, on my new 7600x with fast m2 pciex4 ssd and 32gig ddr5 5600hz mem, it saves in about 4-5 secs.

Tho i did notice the improvement ego did a patch or two back on my 3570k setup. For saves/loading. As think it was longer than 18sec before 5.0 or whenever it was before the saving etc improvements.

[Scoob]

I did notice that loading my v6.10 game in progress save in v6.20 was markedly slower than loading it in native v6.10. I wonder if some conversion progress is taking place, when loading a save from a prior game version? Not had time to test further, just let the game update, loaded my save to check all was working ok, saved, then quit. Will hopefully get more time later.