[Request] Reduce time spent on "saving game..."

[Metran]

Hi Egosoft,

I'm sure I not only speaking for myself but also for most other players. It would be great if something can be done to improve the "saving game" process so that it does not freezes game for upto a couple of mins when it's auto saving the game (or doing a quick save). If at all possible "completely" removing the need to freeze game at all would be the very best in this regard.

Wreak havoc pilots!

[X2-Illuminatus]

This has been addressed many times before (last time here), but is unlikely to change:

I'm afraid saving isn't likely to get much quicker, no matter how many people ask for it on a wish-list. The game universe is a complex structure with complex data, and it simply isn't possible to just take a "snapshot" of memory and save things from that in the background. The game needs to pause while the data is collected for saving.

[Metran]

I'm no expert in programming nor game dev, however I am fairly certain that saving game data in .xml format is not only very slow, very old way of storaging data but also inferior. Save Game data isn't even compressed before it's writen to the disk (auto-saving isn't. manual saving is, it would seem) which would be even more, painfully, slow on low-end mechanical drives.

[StoneLegionYT]

I'm no expert in programming nor game dev, however I am fairly certain that saving game data in .xml format is not only very slow, very old way of storaging data but also inferior. Save Game data isn't even compressed before it's writen to the disk (auto-saving isn't. manual saving is, it would seem) which would be even more, painfully, slow on low-end mechanical drives.

This be why you're not a developer

Why would Saving Raw large Data be slow especially if it's not time spend on compression? What their spending time on is dumping all the data from memory and there is a lot of it as it's an entire simulated universe.

The only real way to avoid this I would assume is to only save parts of the game and oh that would not be pretty.... Their taking a snapshot of everything all at once and storing it...

[Rei Ayanami]

I'm no expert in programming nor game dev, however I am fairly certain that saving game data in .xml format is not only very slow, very old way of storaging data but also inferior. Save Game data isn't even compressed before it's writen to the disk (auto-saving isn't. manual saving is, it would seem) which would be even more, painfully, slow on low-end mechanical drives.

While XML is certainly not very memory-friendly and processing it is rather slow compared to a binary format, it allows some really useful features, such as format validation, easy parsing, patching, filtering, being in a human-readable format or easy save editing with simple text editors, with all these points being extremely hard or borderline impossible, were the save games in super-efficient compressed binary format instead. It's, like so often in informatics, a tradeoff between speed and accessibility/usability, with each side having up- and downsides.

The only real way to avoid this I would assume is to only save parts of the game and oh that would not be pretty.... Their taking a snapshot of everything all at once and storing it...

It is not possible to only save parts of the universe while letting the rest go on. If the saving process did NOT fully stop the entire universe until the entire game is saved, the following could happen :

Imagine having two sectors A and B, with a ship S being in sector B.
Game snapshots only sector A to begin saving it, but sector B keeps going.
While the game is processing sector As snapshot, ship S in the still active sector B uses a gate to jump from sector B to A.
Game is done saving sector As snapshot, now takes snapshot of sector B, with ship S already having left it.

Now ship S is lost to oblivion, with the save file having no knowledge about it since neither sector A nor B had it in its snapshot.

[Alan Phipps]

This was all covered extensively in a much longer and recent thread as stated in the 2nd post of this thread by X2-Illuminatus. Let's not do it all over again here please.