Is there such thing as save game bloat in Daggerfall Unity?

Discuss Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.
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Seferoth
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Is there such thing as save game bloat in Daggerfall Unity?

Post by Seferoth »

This just came in mind while i was playing Oblivion for a change. I am constantly thinking about save game bloating or how eventually my save will be unplayable, it might take 200 hours or 1000 hours but in the end it will stop working and nothing can stop it. Is this the case with Daggerfall Unity, will saves eventually stop working due to bloat?

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Jay_H
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Re: Is there such thing as save game bloat in Daggerfall Unity?

Post by Jay_H »

Nah, the only equivalent would be a save very heavily-encumbered by quests (like thousands of duplicates at a time). And unlike other TES games, the fix would be very simple in that case. DFU doesn't save very much data on a character. One piece of data that does grow is the map discovery information, like the shops and other named buildings you find in towns, but that's hardly much information.

So there's no Oblivion A-Bomb to be found here :lol:

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Seferoth
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Re: Is there such thing as save game bloat in Daggerfall Unity?

Post by Seferoth »

Thought so, but was nice to get a confirmation about it. One more reason why i prefer Daggerfall over other TES games.
Last edited by Seferoth on Sun Dec 05, 2021 12:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Interkarma
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Re: Is there such thing as save game bloat in Daggerfall Unity?

Post by Interkarma »

Not that I'm aware of. Daggerfall doesn't need to hold very much state, and almost nothing about the world itself is stored in saves. It's mostly character state like owned buildings, items, spells, active quests, etc. These are very efficient to store and tend to plateau over time as player maxes out in power and possessions.

There are upper limits to how large a JSON file can grow before it becomes unworkable for an average computer to process. Practically speaking, a save game of 1GB would be painfully slow to load and parse but would probably still load OK.

In my collection, the largest save I have is only 55MB - and I currently have 1131 saves from players sent to me for troubleshooting over last 6 years. Even with mods like Persistent Dungeons, saves tend to level out at 20-30MB. DFU saves are rather tiny. I'd be impressed to see a save over 100MB, and mods would probably be involved to grow that large. Or user would have to done something odd with console like giving themselves hundreds of thousands of items.

Speaking of mods, I can't predict what modders will serialize and the impact it could have, especially if mod isn't efficient in its save schema or is buggy in some way related to saves. At this time however, I've not seen much bloat from mods either.

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