Auto Save

I think the auto save time can be changed, I am sure I saw it somewhere. The default is 10 minutes.

Can you let us know when it starts taking a long time? How many players are there, how many planets? How well developed?

Once it gets to the 1+ minute save time, if you could, end the game (only temperary as it will pick up from the last save point when you reload) take some screen shots of the graphs at the end (print screen - shots stored in C:\Documents and Settings\"username"\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire folder on xp or C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\
on vista). Graphs of interest are the ones which show things like the number of ships built total planets and so on. The other option is to zip up your saved games and send them to stardock.

I dont have the email addy, I am lookin for it now.

They take place every 10 minutes and the time can be adjusted in the user.setting file in the directory listed in the previous post. It can be opened with notepade. They are very slow because we haven't spent anytime optimizing save game sizes. Right now it is more important they work and we also want modders to be able to read the contents seamlessly.

Thanks for the info. I dont mind the long save times so much during beta but it realy is something that should be addressed before final release of the game.

I agree, the auto saving feature is a good idea. It should be
a setting in the options area to set the interval when it
auto saves the game.

well, the autosaving is good, and it doesn't seem to take too long on my machine, shorter than some other games I've played in fact. However, one thing that gets on my nerves is the sheer number of saves. Any chance of adding a limit saved games option somewhere rather than having to go through manually deleting them?

It starts to take longer the , longer the game is because there is more to save I think... I've never had a save thats taken longer than say 5 seconds.

An option for the game to only keep a certain number of autosaves would also be nice. I just finished playing my first games today and came back to nearly 3GB of saves (I know you said you haven't bothered with compressing the saves yet, but even taking that into account, I certainly don't need my past 50 saves lying around. 2-5 are plenty, imo. )

For a real time game the autosave should not cause the game to appear to stall as it does. It just looks cheap. On my Core 2 Duo 2.1Ghz machine it still can appear to take 3-5 seconds. You should consider some sort of asynchronous approach if possible.

In my current game of 3v3 hard, that's drawn out to past 7 hours already the autosave takes around 10 seconds to complete.

That's with an AMD FX-55, 2 GB low latency Ram, and a WD 150 Raptor.

Wow...I hadn't even looked at that part yet. I looked only far enough to see how many autosaves there are. Many games just have one auto that gets saved over. Now, it's nice that there are multiple ones here (so you can go back to a very specific point) but it buries the games that I intentionally made, and I have to scroll for a while to find them.

Suggestions:

1.) Limited number of autos.
2.) Maybe a separate tab for them.

I agree with Weidbrewer and others, you need to limit the number of autosave files. At first I thought having them separate or sorted differently would be good, but if you have limited auto saves, then having yours in the middle shouldn't be bad and tells you if you have an autosave that is more recent since they are sorted by date and time.

its prolly not optimized yet....

Also, many games have a function, in the save and/or load menu(s), which can DELETE saves. Why not implement that?

For now, after a game session, I go into the Ironclad save-folder and delete as many saves as I want.

There's an ERASE button right by the load game list.

I'm surprised he hasn't seen it, as almost everyone I know has clicked on it when they didn't want to, lol...