Dear Obsidian and the Pillars of Eternity development team,
I only just heard about Pillars of Eternity when I was browsing Good Old Games for something to play. I can't believe I never heard of PoE before, but now I'm hooked. (I already backed PoE II and I haven't even finished the original!)
I'm a few hours into the game, and I have a few suggestions for minor technical improvements:
(1) In the journal, it should be easier to go back and edit text. For example: I've been keeping a log of where there are extra camping supplies so that I can go back and pick them up later. But I've had to revise my note-taking method because I discovered that I cannot go back and edit an entry. For example, suppose I wrote something like, "3 camping supplies in Heritage Hill. 1 near entrance, 1 near manor, 1 near tower." Then, suppose I later go and pick up 1 of those 3. If I want to change "3 camping supplies" to "2 camping supplies", I can't go and edit just that one word, like in a word processor. Instead, I must delete the whole entry. And it's even worse if a given note entry has several days of entries. If I want to go and change the first day's entry, I have to backspace over all the previous days, change the text, and then manually retype everything. So note-taking should be like a word processor, where you can move the cursor and select a particular bit of text to edit.
(2) It should be possible to add notes to maps. For example, I'd like to be able to put a note on the map like, "locked door here" so that I can easily find it when my mechanics skill improves. I've been leaving notes to myself in the journal which ordinarily, I would prefer to leave as a note on the map. In the Infinity Engine games by Black Isle, you could annotate maps, so I'd like that feature to carry over, please.
(3) Finally, could you please make the the save and load game operation faster? As I've been playing the game longer, I've found that saving and loading takes longer and longer. And I've had to modify my play style to compensate. I'm a pretty conservative player, and suppose I see 3 traps in a row, I often like to disarm one, then save, then disarm a 2nd, then save again, etc., saving after every little thing in case I die or do something stupid. And if an important dialogue comes up, I like to save right before and try every single dialogue option out of curiosity, reloading over and over. But I've found that saving and loading now takes what seems like a minute or two. So I've had to save and reload far less frequently, or else I'd never get anything done.
Note that I'm not just talking about the load times. The save times are also extremely long. When I click "save," I get an hourglass and I have to wait about a minute before I'm allowed to name the savegame.
My hard disk is a Toshiba XG4 PCIe NVMe SSD, using 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0, so it's nearly the fastest SSD money can buy. I quickly ran the manufacturer's benchmark, and I get:
Sequential (128 KiB) read: 1.00 GiB/s
Sequential (128 KiB) write: 733.87 MiB/s
Random (4 KiB) read: 566.08 MiB/s
Random (4 KiB) write: 208.54 MiB/s
Latency: minimum 26 us, average 311 us
I got basically similar benchmarks in AS SDD, CrystalDiskMark, and Anvil. So I don't think it's a problem with my disk. Now, my disk isn't the absolute fastest - as I mentioned, I have only 2 lanes of PCIe, not the usual 4, and it's not a Samsung 960 Pro - but still, it's pretty up there. If I'm having trouble with save and load times, I can't imagine what people must be experiencing if they have a mechanical hard drive.
At this rate, you should ask Intel to bundle their new Optane SSD 900P with Pillars of Eternity instead of Star Citizen.
I am attaching a system summary from MSInfo.exe. Briefly, my computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad E570 laptop with a dual-core Intel Core i7-7500U, 16 GB of RAM, Nividia Geforce GTX 950M.
*** Edit: so I found a suggestion by someone online to "delete" all but a few save games. So backed up my oldest savegames and deleted them from the Pillars of Eternity save location, keeping only the last few save games there. Now, when I fire up PoE, my save time is a split-second, rather than several minutes. Before, when I clicked the "save" button, I'd get an hourglass and wait a minute before I got to pick a savegame name. Now, the savegame dialogue comes right up, immediately. So that workaround seems to have worked extremely well. Still, a person shouldn't have to do that. Something's wrong when the time it takes to save a game is a function of how many savegames happen to be on the hard drive already. The time to save a game should only be a function of the game I'm actively playing, not how many other savegames are already there. (Except insofar as SSDs slow down when they get full because they start running short on scratch space.) Simply moving a savegame to another folder shouldn't make my saves faster.
Question
Mikewind Dale
Dear Obsidian and the Pillars of Eternity development team,
I only just heard about Pillars of Eternity when I was browsing Good Old Games for something to play. I can't believe I never heard of PoE before, but now I'm hooked. (I already backed PoE II and I haven't even finished the original!)
I'm a few hours into the game, and I have a few suggestions for minor technical improvements:
(1) In the journal, it should be easier to go back and edit text. For example: I've been keeping a log of where there are extra camping supplies so that I can go back and pick them up later. But I've had to revise my note-taking method because I discovered that I cannot go back and edit an entry. For example, suppose I wrote something like, "3 camping supplies in Heritage Hill. 1 near entrance, 1 near manor, 1 near tower." Then, suppose I later go and pick up 1 of those 3. If I want to change "3 camping supplies" to "2 camping supplies", I can't go and edit just that one word, like in a word processor. Instead, I must delete the whole entry. And it's even worse if a given note entry has several days of entries. If I want to go and change the first day's entry, I have to backspace over all the previous days, change the text, and then manually retype everything. So note-taking should be like a word processor, where you can move the cursor and select a particular bit of text to edit.
(2) It should be possible to add notes to maps. For example, I'd like to be able to put a note on the map like, "locked door here" so that I can easily find it when my mechanics skill improves. I've been leaving notes to myself in the journal which ordinarily, I would prefer to leave as a note on the map. In the Infinity Engine games by Black Isle, you could annotate maps, so I'd like that feature to carry over, please.
(3) Finally, could you please make the the save and load game operation faster? As I've been playing the game longer, I've found that saving and loading takes longer and longer. And I've had to modify my play style to compensate. I'm a pretty conservative player, and suppose I see 3 traps in a row, I often like to disarm one, then save, then disarm a 2nd, then save again, etc., saving after every little thing in case I die or do something stupid. And if an important dialogue comes up, I like to save right before and try every single dialogue option out of curiosity, reloading over and over. But I've found that saving and loading now takes what seems like a minute or two. So I've had to save and reload far less frequently, or else I'd never get anything done.
Note that I'm not just talking about the load times. The save times are also extremely long. When I click "save," I get an hourglass and I have to wait about a minute before I'm allowed to name the savegame.
My hard disk is a Toshiba XG4 PCIe NVMe SSD, using 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0, so it's nearly the fastest SSD money can buy. I quickly ran the manufacturer's benchmark, and I get:
Sequential (128 KiB) read: 1.00 GiB/s
Sequential (128 KiB) write: 733.87 MiB/s
Random (4 KiB) read: 566.08 MiB/s
Random (4 KiB) write: 208.54 MiB/s
Latency: minimum 26 us, average 311 us
I got basically similar benchmarks in AS SDD, CrystalDiskMark, and Anvil. So I don't think it's a problem with my disk. Now, my disk isn't the absolute fastest - as I mentioned, I have only 2 lanes of PCIe, not the usual 4, and it's not a Samsung 960 Pro - but still, it's pretty up there. If I'm having trouble with save and load times, I can't imagine what people must be experiencing if they have a mechanical hard drive.
At this rate, you should ask Intel to bundle their new Optane SSD 900P with Pillars of Eternity instead of Star Citizen.
I am attaching a system summary from MSInfo.exe. Briefly, my computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad E570 laptop with a dual-core Intel Core i7-7500U, 16 GB of RAM, Nividia Geforce GTX 950M.
*** Edit: so I found a suggestion by someone online to "delete" all but a few save games. So backed up my oldest savegames and deleted them from the Pillars of Eternity save location, keeping only the last few save games there. Now, when I fire up PoE, my save time is a split-second, rather than several minutes. Before, when I clicked the "save" button, I'd get an hourglass and wait a minute before I got to pick a savegame name. Now, the savegame dialogue comes right up, immediately. So that workaround seems to have worked extremely well. Still, a person shouldn't have to do that. Something's wrong when the time it takes to save a game is a function of how many savegames happen to be on the hard drive already. The time to save a game should only be a function of the game I'm actively playing, not how many other savegames are already there. (Except insofar as SSDs slow down when they get full because they start running short on scratch space.) Simply moving a savegame to another folder shouldn't make my saves faster.
Thank you.
system info.txt
Edited by Mikewind DaleLink to comment
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