How much does traveling affect a save file?

Zei

How much does traveling on vacation, to the future, to college affect the size of the save file? My loading times are getting longer and longer and I wouldn't want to make it worse.

igazor

Travel causes the overall size of the save folders to grow because it adds separate nhd files for each world having been played and increases the size of the TravelDB file. None of that should increase load times (by much) because it's only the currently being played world's nhd that gets loaded into RAM on startup and offloaded during saves, quits, and travel transitions. The rest of it just gets dragged along for the ride and the TravelDB is used as a reference database with changes recorded within it when needed.

Are you using SaveCleaner or some such method to manage the size of your save file and its components? How large (in MBs) is the currently being played nhd file? Do you have scrapbook memories switched off or managed by a mod -- these will bloat saves like crazy over time if they are allowed to accumulate without being managed. And are you routinely clearing (deleting) the five cache files on the top level of your TS3 user game folder in Documents in between game sessions?

And how long are we talking about for load times? It's typically fine and to be expected if an ongoing save used to take three minutes to load but now it takes four or five. If we are talking about 25 minutes whereas a newly started game loads up instantly, then that requires a different conversation (like the above).

Zei

igazor wrote: »

Travel causes the overall size of the save folders to grow because it adds separate nhd files for each world having been played and increases the size of the TravelDB file. None of that should increase load times (by much) because it's only the currently being played world's nhd that gets loaded into RAM on startup and offloaded during saves, quits, and travel transitions. The rest of it just gets dragged along for the ride and the TravelDB is used as a reference database with changes recorded within it when needed.

Are you using SaveCleaner or some such method to manage the size of your save file and its components? How large (in MBs) is the currently being played nhd file? Do you have scrapbook memories switched off or managed by a mod -- these will bloat saves like crazy over time if they are allowed to accumulate without being managed. And are you routinely clearing (deleting) the five cache files on the top level of your TS3 user game folder in Documents in between game sessions?

And how long are we talking about for load times? It's typically fine and to be expected if an ongoing save used to take three minutes to load but now it takes four or five. If we are talking about 25 minutes whereas a newly started game loads up instantly, then that requires a different conversation (like the above).

The nhd file of my Strangetown folder (current game) is aroudn 150 mb. I have scrapbook memories switched off bu default. I always clear my caches before playing. I use save cleaner but not often enough I suppose...

igazor

That doesn't sound overly large to me. I don't usually take action until an nhd reaches 300 or 400 MB, but others do so sooner. But again, what kind of startup times (increasing from what to what) are we talking about?