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Save size suddenly bloating? Post here!
luthienrising
Posts: 37,628 Member
So @ceejay402 and I were thinking we'd start collecting info here about game size bloat. We haven't had it in our games, but other people have, and suddenly, and it seems to be one cause of game crashing too. I'm going to keep an eye out for a SimGuru chat to post in.
In the meantime, if you do have saves that bloated suddenly, please share what you can here! What's your save size? When did it bloat? What can you tell us about your gameplay? Anything at all might be helpful to start!
Useful kinds of info:
And super helpful would be this! If your save file has bloated to over 10 Mb, upload it to Dropbox or Mediafire and add a link here. EA do know about the game bloat problem, and it would be awesome if they could peek into your saves first hand!
Do let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see added to that list!
@crinrict, is there a Bugs forum topic for save game size bloating? I didn't see one but I usually miss when there's already a bug post anyway. (Which is pathetic, given I used to run a forum where I kept track of topics to merge duplicates! I feel guilty now every time I create a duplicate ... )
In the meantime, if you do have saves that bloated suddenly, please share what you can here! What's your save size? When did it bloat? What can you tell us about your gameplay? Anything at all might be helpful to start!
Useful kinds of info:
- save size, and also size of folders like Tray, Lotdatacache, Scratch, Cache, and the file localthumbcache.package
- town population if you count them all in Manage Households
- town population using the getpopulation mod from Mod the Sims
- any CC?
- mods you had when the game bloated?
- gallery content in the game? (that is, stuff you downloaded from Community and added to your game - lots, Sims ...)
- value of the households you play, and what's in their inventories
- your saving workflow (how to you save? how often? how do you exit the game? how often?)
- how long you'd been playing this game when it bloated
- anything you've done in an attempt to reduce your save size
And super helpful would be this! If your save file has bloated to over 10 Mb, upload it to Dropbox or Mediafire and add a link here. EA do know about the game bloat problem, and it would be awesome if they could peek into your saves first hand!
Do let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see added to that list!
@crinrict, is there a Bugs forum topic for save game size bloating? I didn't see one but I usually miss when there's already a bug post anyway. (Which is pathetic, given I used to run a forum where I kept track of topics to merge duplicates! I feel guilty now every time I create a duplicate ... )
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Post edited by luthienrising on
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Let me see if I can find it (later)
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can you update first post to ask people to post info, like size of the saves and also what other info should we ask upfront get to add town pop maybe? amount of gallery content in game and CC
Definitely large enough to be of interest! Plus the kind of sudden bloating behaviour other people have described. Would you be open to posting your game online where a developer can access it too? I believe they have one, but it takes more than one of anything to track most bugs
People seem to be using Dropbox and Mediafire - whichever you prefer
for same game on 7th generation:
-on 19/9 at 1pm, save size was 7,262K
-on same day (19/9), 11pm size moved to 35 094 (something strange in that the saves around 3pm had vero files in 30 k but the save file is still 7k. At 11pm the save file then moves to 35k
-current save size is nearly 51K - to just load this save will already bring memory usage to 2.9/3GB.(this is really worrying me).
-current entire save folder is 5 GB
-current tray is just under 4MB
-Lotdatacache 5.79MB
-Scratch 32MB
-cache 82KB
-local thumb cache 1.24KB
town population: living in houses 30 residents. There are currently 4 Not in World sims, but the game deletes them (as per other reports) nightly if they are not living in a house.
population using mod: not sure, will post later, once get hold of mod.
no CC as far as I am aware (i.e. have downloaded a few things from gallery and no CC was indicated). No mods or cc that I have put in game.
have used gallery. minimal though. Downloaded a few houses.
current household - resides in Cypress Terrace in Willow Creek. Lot is worth 272,863. cash at hand is 557,000. Build mode inventory has 9 rows, but with most single objects, e.g. collectables, pictures, some career objects. Did have a massive inventory with hundreds of plants (that seemed to be preventing me moving in NPCs around 4th gen, game would crash, but have cleaned it out since then). I had already moved house when the game file size bloated, and the last house was also pretty big (Garden Essence - Chrillsims, gallery), so it doesn't seem to be about the house.
saving - don't load autosave, manual load of last manual save, use save as for each load, save very regularly, and then exit without saving.
game was started on 4/09. have played regularly, mostly on this family. origin hours are 190 (minus 25 hours or so on demo), so nearly I'd say about 160 hrs on this game play...
no idea on how to try to reduce save size. I further cleaned out inventory, but there is not really a lot there. I try to clean out the personal inventory pretty regularly as well, as a lot of plants are collected.
will link to saves when done.
thanks, happy to clarify anything or provide more info.
Edit: also have not played any other families, just one active family.
Links to save files ( I used the file called Save; not ver - hope that is right):
http://www.mediafire.com/download/4r1buu3ru2a3cbu/Slot_0000002e.save
http://www.mediafire.com/download/4r1buu3ru2a3cbu/Slot_0000002e.save
http://www.mediafire.com/download/4r1buu3ru2a3cbu/Slot_0000002e.save
Never used sharing tools like this before, so if I've done something wrong, please let me know. It includes the pre, bloated and current save.
Here is the info I have ... I don't have everything because I have cleared caches, and refreshed files a few times since it happened.
In terms of my habits, I always do "save as" and close the game without saving. I save regularly, I try to save every 30 mins or so of gameplay unless something significant occurs (age-up, birth etc) in which case I save again. I play one household mainly (when bloating occurred they were on 4th/5th generation), but do a little bit of micro-managing of the rest of the neighbourhoods in absence of story progression to keep them going e.g. moving in sims, marrying them, adding kids etc, so most the lots have occupants. I hardly ever download sims or make my own for the game, I like to be "authentic" and add sims who are "not inworld", so the neighbourhoods get along without too much interference from me. I do get new "not inworld" characters arrive when my sims go to community lots or hire bartenders etc ... but unless I go to manage households quickly and add them into one of the households or any empty lots they quickly vanish. This hasn't always been the case and to begin with I had non-inworld characters and families appear on the scene age and die but not anymore. I think this is because I am well over the 180 population limit, which apparently is the cut off when non-inworld characters get culled.
Anyway, in my case bloating occurred in the space between two saves: save no. 341 on Sept 22nd 6.14pm and save no. 342 at 6.55pm. Here are some comparisons ... apart from actual save size, there is hardly any difference in what I can see:
Save size: post bloat 18562KB, pre bloat 6841KB
Pop size overall: post bloat 288, pre bloat 286
Inworld sims: post bloat 80, pre bloat 80 (there are "empty" households included in the manage household sections, which are dead sims)
Not inworld sims: post bloat 11, pre bloat 9
Cash: post bloat 260510, pre bloat 259562
In terms of what is in the inventories, there is a fair amount but nothing excessive, just a few promotion gifts, that kind of thing. The family lives in Brook bungalow, with what was already there and a few other odds and ends (computers etc). From what I can see nothing unusual happened in my family between saves.
In terms of mods I have a whole load about 40 altogether ... some custom content, but most of it is stuff to improve gameplay (no highlight, get population, buyable vehicles, extra caffeine, teen jobs for all, etc). The one thing that did happen around this time, is that I added the no genealogicide mod (I was already suffering from vanishing sims at the time) .... I am not sure if this had anything to do with the bloating although as you can see there was virtually no change in population size between saves.
Hope this is useful! I don't want to upload my saves anywhere, sorry about that.
On Sims 3 I have a very similar play style (one household over several generations) and used NRaaS mods to keep that running smoothly. However, I used to get huge saves (200MB+) even with memories switched off, til I discovered the marvellous "save cleaner" mod, which cut my save size by two-thirds at least ... not sure how it works, I think it gets rid of snapshots that get made everytime you enter CAS or something ... anyhow I hope some similar miracle cure arrives for TS4 soon!
My saves has suddenly shot up to 44MB each. And the game saves 6 versions for each save (.save, .save.ver0, .save.ver1, .save.ver2, .save.ver3, .save.ver4) plus another set of 6 for the auto save.
I had been saving to multiple different numbered save files but the last couple of days my save folder shot up to 2GB so I backed up most of it to One Drive and am just going to work off of one save and keep re-saving to that from now on I guess. I don't have the space to have gigabytes and gigabytes of bloated save files.
The only way I can think of right now to maybe solve it even temporarily is to upload the family and the house to the Gallery, completely wipe everything and reinstall from scratch and then add that lot back. But that's really drastic and I'd lose all the friends and family who don't reside with them and everyone in the entire neighborhood so I'd rather not have to do that.
Those .varX files are your previous saves, actually. Just Windows can only show you the date the files were renamed.
What happened in your gameplay around when the filesize bloated?
I have a fair amount of custom content, mostly clothing. I wouldn't think that would do it since it just adds textures mostly and those shouldn't be getting saved in the save file, not the actual textures, maybe just a reference to them but that should be small.
I do notice the size keeps creeping up. It's now over 50 MB. I haven't added more plants though and if anything I took some away.
I guess next thing I can go through and try deleting some households who none of my sims are friends with and see if that helps. :-/ I'm really at my wit's end on what to try and the file size keeps creeping up and up.