This is one of the parts GOG are doing way worse than Steam. Even with a 1GB limit I still have to constantly remove save files from Pathfinder WotR to make it fit inside the cloud sync. 200MB is ridiculously small.
A heavily modded Skyrim/FO4 save with hundreds of hours on it can easily go above 200mb.
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Poor optimization of save files probably
Most games never hit anywhere near that, but some large open world rpgs like Skyrim track the location of every single object in the game world. Like you can drop a piece of cheese on the bottom left corner of the map, come back 500 hours later, and it’ll still be there. now imagine all of the objects you’re buying and selling and manipulating over those hundreds of hours. Now add in a shit ton of script mods and other stuff that may add even more objects. And add in all of the quest data and interaction data that gets saved etc etc, and your save file can easily hit multiple gigabytes, with each file approaching 200mb.
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Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it’s not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.
It was a lot worse with Skyrim’s original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they’re most likely to have poor data management in some mod.
Bold of you to assume the data in save files is packed binary and not something like JSON where { “x”: 13872, “y”: -17312, “z”: -20170 } requires 40 bytes of storage.
Agreed. JSON solves:
- the ‘versioning’ problem, where the data fields change after an update. That’s a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
- makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
- very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
- actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you’ve done the fast serialisation, anyway.
For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I’d probably never consider anything else.
Each object also needs the orientation, possibly also velocity and angular rates.
