Quick saving and loading times increased greatly after 20~ hours

[Gringos]

Hi everyone!

 

After 20~ hours in Pillars, the game began to slow down considerably in loading times.

I'm 30 hours in right now and the issue persists after computer restart.

 

I like to save often. When I saved in early hours of the game it took about a second - now it's up to 6 seconds per save.

Loading screens take about 10 seconds+ now. Going through 4 loading screens of purely waiting to advance a quest became the most annoying thing.

Does anyone have a clue how I can get the load times back down again?

 

My specs:

Windows 7

Intel Core i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX960

16GB RAM

 

Edit: Here's my latest quicksave

Since the upload cap is 1mb here, had to host somewhere else

Edited March 28, 2015 by Gringos

[kinkytreebeard]

Same issue, takes almost a whole minute between transitions it's killing me.

[Moff]

I'm wondering if some people do NOT have this issue? Is it a general problem?

[Akachi]

I think it's an Unity bug, had it with other games (like Might and Magic X). To put it simply- it's not a very good engine for complex games.

[topuklu]

Same issue, it's really annoying. Anyone know devs are aware of that? Will they fix it via upcoming 1.03 patch?

[naradin]

Got the same issue.

[sparklecat]

I also have this, and the size of my save files is definitely growing over time; that's the quick and autosave at the top.

 

[naradin]

It would be wrong if they didnt grow... just FYI :D

[eRe4s3r]

Tis true, but with size also grows load and save time, and more bloated it becomes, the longer loading any single area in the game takes.

 

If this were just the size we'd have no problem A SSD can read 100mb in a second. But having extremely (and ever growing) load/save/area transition times is possibly game-breaking, at the very least patience breaking.

 

And that 1 save posted here on page 2 takes over 1 minute to transition anywhere. 1 minute per area transition.... something with Unity and how it's used here must be very broken if loading and saving assets takes this long.

 

My saves are now 4.4mb and load times are around 28 seconds + autosave, and remember this is on a SSD setup that should do this in less than 2 seconds. Others have substantially worse load-times (I can't even imagine how much people must suffer with a HDD here)

 

I truly hope this is tackled by the devs....

[sparklecat]

It would be wrong if they didnt grow... just FYI :D

Yep, but one of the devs was asking someone who was having this same thing to send them one of their later saves, which suggests they're not supposed to be growing this much/quickly.

[daede]

I have the same problem. Been playing for 30 hours and it takes ages for my ten saves to load in the menu and the transition loading grows ever longer.

[Druckerpatrone]

As mentioned before, I think it is connected to the mobileobject file in the savegame (you can open it with winrar/7zip).

Mobileobject is getting bigger and bigger (file on the top). The save file itself is 5mb. Maybe the compression need a lot of time.

 

 

Please fix this or at least give us a workaround! (removing autosave, removing companions, whatever)

Edited March 30, 2015 by Druckerpatrone

[Quantics]

FWIW, Mac saves don't seem to be affected. 

 

My MobileObjects.save is only ~2mb

 

[Arctic]

Indeed this is true, probably its related to the savefile size.

[Depili]

I'm also experiencing this, at the end of act2 the load times on area transitions are starting to get unbearable. But I don't even have that mobileobjects.save file with my savegames. The save files are around 5Mb a pop.

 

The archive contains total of 42Mb of unpacked data according to 7zip, but that data takes up only around half of the savegame size when packed, so there might be something else in the save archive also.

 

Currently when saving the game goes unresponsive for a while and any keypresses during that time will be amplified, ie. tapping a arrow key will scroll the whole map to one edge once the saving has been completed and game is responsive again.

Edited March 30, 2015 by Depili

[CaptainCaveman]

Same problem here. Load times have crept up to 30 seconds and keep going up. This is running off a Samsung 840 EVO SSD with a Quad core i7 with 24GB RAM.

 

The save game files (I think the main save files are in %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Pillars of Eternity) have increased from 160KB to 2MB in three days of play.

 

The temp save files (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\Obsidian Entertainment\Pillars of Eternity\TempSaveData) are between 100KB and 1MB for the .lvl files with no show of increase over time. MobileObjects.save is 2MB.

 

Looking at Resource Monitor, it seems that during load times there is no bottleneck in disk or network throughput as you'd erxpect, but one CPU core spins up to maximum usage indicating that the load operation is single threaded and CPU constrained. I suspect that as the save file builds up game state it's taking longer to save/load this file due to the amount of clutter it's having to serialize/deserialize.

 

Hopefully this can be optimised, otherwise it would be great to be able to switch off autosaves on screen transiitions which I suspect are taking up most of the extra load times.

 

Hope this helps and thanks for such a great game!

[zephiris]

I am 20 hours into the game and I have not noticed any difference with saving and loading what so ever.

But my PC specs are a bit insane... So that could explain. Hope I won't notice this over time, we'll see.

 

You guys also have this issue with SSD's that can read/write with 550MB/s ?

 

p.s.

 

Do you think its possible to delete all the save games while you have the game loaded? And after deleting (assuming certain save files are not locked) you just save the game again and maybe the save is now normal again without losing your progress?

Edited March 30, 2015 by zephiris

[azgult]

SSD's are irrelevant here, as it is obvious that read/write speed isn't a bottleneck. Compression also seems unlikely, as the save files can easily be extracted and re-zipped in under a second. It would seem to be more of an issue of how the files themselves are generated (esp. the MobileObjects.save).

[flashmanandy]

On act  III 

Same issues as above, very slow loading, very slow transitions. I can almost make a cup of tea doing fetch quests!

 

my mobileobjcts is silly sized 

 

Onedrive file found here

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=ddf5d2809979ce21!32861&authkey=!AANFl8tbabm_kvw&ithint=file%2csavegame

[Kingsbach]

same problem here

[Xatulu]

Got the same problem, started to get very annoying during Act 2. Hoping for a quick fix. (Along with some other things like the passive effects)

[mipthehappy]

I'm a bit worried that this is beginning to affect my game as well. I noticed that my saving and loading times have slowly been increasing as I have played although they aren't nearly as bad as those reported in this thread (yet?). I am currently in act 1 with all of the companions bar one and quick saving takes 3-4 seconds where it used to be close to instant. Everything is on my SSD so it's not a case of hard disk speed.

[arx]

Manually editing and recompiling the assemblies to disable autosaves cut my load times to under 10 seconds. 

 

It's not a perfect solution by any means, but I really don't need a save for *every* zone transition. An in-game option for this would be really easy to implement and would keep the game playable.

[eRe4s3r]

For me it only really started when I was in Defiance Bay.... and it got much worse ever since then.. now at 27 seconds for area transitions;) (act 3 elms song)

Edited March 30, 2015 by eRe4s3r

[Miura]

 

Manually editing and recompiling the assemblies to disable autosaves cut my load times to under 10 seconds. 

 

It's not a perfect solution by any means, but I really don't need a save for *every* zone transition. An in-game option for this would be really easy to implement and would keep the game playable.

 

 

And how can we do this?

[at0mic]

yes yes. how do we do this? share exe?