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

[LordCrash]

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

 

Do you use cloud saves? If yes, maybe it's Steam (upload/download) related?

 

How much free disc space to you have on your system drive?

 

Do you run the game as administrator?

 

You could also provide one of these savegames so that the devs can check them out (like suggested in the pinned thread here on the board).

Edited March 28, 2015 by LordCrash

[Gringos]

Do you use cloud saves? If yes, maybe it's Steam (upload/download) related?

 

How much free disc space to you have on your system drive?

 

Do you run the game as administrator?

 

You could also provide one of these savegames so that the devs can check them out (like suggested in the pinned thread here on the board).

 

 

I use steam synchronization. Just disabled that for Pillars, just to be sure. Anyhow, I have a 10k upload with nothing interfering, so a 4500 kb file shouldn't take 6 seconds.

 

Enough space. My drives aren't even on half capacity.

 

I am the administrator.

 

I'll attach a savegame to the main post, provided I figure out how.

 

Thanks

[vegetable]

I am having this same issue with loadtimes and quicksave time getting much much longer  over time, to the point where it's nearly unplayable - loadtimes are 30secs-ish, quicksave takes 20 - and i'm on the hardest difficulty and i need my quicksaves :<

 

Early on it was fine, but the longer it goes ,the longer every load an and save takes.

 

EDIT: did some testing, for me it seems to be directly related to the number of people i have available - at 6 and below saving was near insatnt, at 7 it started take a while, 8th pushed it to pretty annoying numbers, now at 10 it takes about 22 seconds to save and about 1 minute and 5 seconds to area transistion.

 

EDIT2: Game itself is on two raid0:d sata3 SSD:s, savefile on a sata3 SSD,  other computer specs are also far above minimums.

Edited March 28, 2015 by vegetable

[LadyCrimson]

I've seen some posts on the Steam forums talking about this. Out of curiosity, how big have the save files become?

 

Could be duplicating saves in a temp file system or maybe the autosave - wish there was a way to turn the autosave off, actually, anyone know a trick for that?

[vegetable]

my save is about 3.9mb, and steam cloud syncing seems to have no effect on it - does it even sync before shutting down the game?

 

EDIT: Checked the temp save folder at (users/something/appdata/local/temp/obsidian entertainment/pillars of eternity/tempsavedata), found a "mobileobjects.save", that is 75mb, and in (locallow/obsidian entertainment/pillars of eteernity/currenet game) a "mobileobjects.save" at 92 mb.

 

What are those and should they be there and that big?

 

EDIT2: checked with another player, his version of the file is about 3mb, and he's further than i am in the game, so something is definitely wrong. Or it's related to playing on hardest difficulty?

Edited March 28, 2015 by vegetable

[Roby Atadero]

Could you by chance upload one of your big save files?

[vegetable]

I'm uploading it to google drive atm, i can send the link to it via email, or if you point me to another preferred upload place, i can do that too.

[vegetable]

Ok, another check done, each time i save, it remakes the mobileobjects.save in the non-temp folder, and that is what takes up the time.

[mrmonocle]

+1 on the savetime becoming ridiculus over time.

[vegetable]

I popped a link to my 89mb savefile (which is nowdays closer to 100 than 90), hopefully we get some solution (even temporary one), because this is borderline unplayable for me :<

 

EDIT: in about 1 hour and 10 mins, the file has grown from 92000kb to 105000kb, so the rate of growing is quite high.

Edited March 28, 2015 by vegetable

[Kavonde]

I'm also experiencing the same issue.  I've got 8 companions at the moment (one of 'em hired at an inn, the rest story folk), and am roughly 30 hours in.  Moving from map to map takes upwards of 30 seconds, which is starting to really wear on me.

 

The game is installed on an SSD, but all the save files (and my Windows install, which, yes, seemed like a good idea at the time and which I now regret) are on a regular hard drive.  During a loading screen, the cursor usually pops up after just a few seconds, but it takes much longer to actually autosave the game and let me play.

 

This whole thing could be worked around temporarily if there was an option to disable autosaves on map transitions, but... nada.  Anyone know if there's a trigger we can flip in the data files somewhere?

[spacehamzter]

HELP the Hamzter!

After 20hrs. Quick Save 15seconds-time to load and auto save 30seconds. Steam version.

Geforce GTX980M

Intel® Core 17-4710HQ CPU @2.50ghz

16.0 GB Ram

256GB M.2 SSD (Boot) + 1TB 5400RPM

Windows 10 Tch preview

 

link to steam topic: http://steamcommunity.com/app/291650/discussions/0/618457398965827041/

Edited March 28, 2015 by spacehamzter

[vegetable]

spacehamzter: The character-number relation might not be as simple as just how many you have,  though it seems to be a part of it. The real reason is that the "MobileObjects.save" file (location described above), grows far larger than it should, and every time the game saves (auto or otherwise), it has to rewrite that, and that takes time.

 

Why and what breaks to cause that behavior, is unclear (at least to me).

[Techrocket9]

Tangentially, the regular save menu takes longer and longer to open the more saves you have. I only have 70 saves so far and already it is up to 5 seconds for the save menu to open (the directory the game decided to write saves to is on my mechanical HD).

 

I suspect that this is due to the game loading thumbnails for every save, requiring a ton of disk reads to display the menu.

 

I think the game should fall back to reading filenames only and loading other content on click once you pass 50 saves or so.

 

At this rate the save menu will take literal minutes to open by the time I finish the game (in most RPGs I rack up a few thousand saves per playthrough).

Edited March 28, 2015 by Techrocket9

[spacehamzter]

I deleted all my saves, had a ton, now just the auto and quick, even reinstalled, still the same wait.

[vegetable]

The thumbnails take about 42kb and 7 reads per save, so that shouldn't cause big problems, unless finding the files takes abnormally long., and with a couple dozen saves i have not noticed problems there.

 

PS. MobileObjects is now up to 128552kb.

[eRe4s3r]

I definitely noticed problems ,) Save menu opens quickly but saving/loading takes a good 10+ seconds, on a pure SSD setup.

 

Here is one of my latest saves from act 2 (3.4MB packed 3.1MB)

http://www.mediafire.com/download/t84jjmhpo7v6jha/e6f43dbc06824c1c981e0bc38ad015b9_13516728_CrucibleKeep.zip

 

It creates these saves EVERY single load of an area, and this takes longer and longer to do. Meaning area loads take longer and longer.... the Keep is a complete nightmare to navigate because of this ;P

[Tort]

I popped a link to my 89mb savefile (which is nowdays closer to 100 than 90), hopefully we get some solution (even temporary one), because this is borderline unplayable for me :<

 

EDIT: in about 1 hour and 10 mins, the file has grown from 92000kb to 105000kb, so the rate of growing is quite high.

It is obviously a bug, I had such issue with HoI3 on release, had to manually edit out the BS until fix, that why its always best to wait for couple of patches..

[Gringos]

Could you by chance upload one of your big save files?

 

I edited a link to my latest save file into the first post. It's 4,5mb at the moment and growing.

[Techrocket9]

An even simpler fix for the too-many saves problem would be to only show the newest 15 saves or so in the menu, with a "show older saves" button that loads the rest. It is uncommon to need to access more than 15 saves back, and I could deal with slow load times in those circumstances. This would solve the issue of all save operations being very slow with large numbers of saves.

[vegetable]

There isn't really an issue with many saves, though.

[Techrocket9]

There isn't really an issue with many saves, though.

 

On my system pulling up the save menu slows to a crawl around the 50 save mark. By 80 saves it takes upwards of 10 seconds for the menu to pull up.

 

I have to go into windows explorer and manually archive my saves every couple of hours to keep the save menu responsive.

[Troy4747]

Am having a similar issue, which is extremely slow area load/transition times.  30 seconds to a minute, starting around Act II. 

[eRe4s3r]

So now in Act 3 Hearthsong..

 

In Hearthsong the situation got worse, changing AREA's and quickloading takes now 20 seconds. And I wish I was joking. I looked at the clock (because it takes forever to change areas or load from a party wipe now)

 

Save size is now 3.8mb

http://www.mediafire.com/download/8o3b7owl27pck5x/e6f43dbc06824c1c981e0bc38ad015b9_14501915_Hearthsong.zip

 

The save menu itself with 20 saves takes about 5 seconds to open. This feels very sluggish and slow but I could live with that. But what I can't live with it quicksaves taking a good 14 seconds, quickloads taking 20 ! seconds or entire area changes taking 20 seconds. I am talking about "From Hearthsong into Market" and back (40 seconds altogether load times) that's longer than I was in the market itself.

 

You may think "20 seconds is nothing" but it is a lot. To explore you enter and exit tiny areas all the time, these take 20 seconds to load going in, and 20 seconds to load going out add up to many many minutes of wasted time and waiting. Worse if you are often quicksaving (as you should) and often saving in new slots (as you, normally, should)

 

So load/save and area change times are constantly increasing, and very much so. By 500% for me.

 

I have 16GB Ram, Win7 x64 and both Game and OS on a Samsung 830 SSD

[happybuddha]

Hey guys I may have a workaround for you, it worked for me anyway.

 

The crazy load and save time issue as well as inventory lag went away when I disconnected my network adapters and ran the game as administrator.

Got the idea from here, means no internet while I play but for now, worth it.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72049-workarounds-for-several-known-issues-3-27-15/

Hope it helps you guys too

 

-Tofu