Hi all, just wondering: is there was a way to delete certain parts of your map that you aren’t using thus reducing your save file size? Could you do this without corrupting the rest of your world? I’m using a pretty crummy laptop and this would help me greatly 
I don’t think this is possible right now. Maybe in the future…
Well…
You could delete the Master.txt file, that holds all item/furniture/vehicle information of all areas you’ve ever went to.
Unfortunately, that means everything that’s not in your inventory goes poof. The overland map is still the same, but the entire sector will be respawned as if you’re exploring it for the first time.
That might be an interesting thing to try…
Pump dem spawn rate then delete the file
then once you’ve cleared the city or something go delete the save file again
You character remains, and the world shifts around you. Might be quite interesting. Chalk it up to parallel worlds or dimensional instability or some equally contrived thing.
A change has been merged to the experimental that should (theoretically) speed up save time by a rather noticeable factor if this is what you’re worried about, but it won’t do anything for save file size.
Thanks for your input guys. That is an interesting idea dwarfkoala, maybe it could be implemented as a new feature (like a teleporter, but cross-dimensional)? Yeah I need to check out the latest experimental release. Still on the stable, so I’ll see how well it works.
I hadn’t even thought of that, if you nuke maps.txt and restart it’ll keep the same overmap, but spawn a whole new set of overmaps. Yea that could indeed be a feature.
If you were really clever you could maybe use the coordinates to delete only the parts you don’t care about.
Anyway, I need to find some time to fix this, the game is stupidly loading all map data ever at start, and it doesn’t need to.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:7, topic:4047”]I hadn’t even thought of that, if you nuke maps.txt and restart it’ll keep the same overmap, but spawn a whole new set of overmaps. Yea that could indeed be a feature.
If you were really clever you could maybe use the coordinates to delete only the parts you don’t care about.
Anyway, I need to find some time to fix this, the game is stupidly loading all map data ever at start, and it doesn’t need to.[/quote]
Although you’re definitely much more knowledgeable on the issue Kevin, it would seem that the only parts of the map that need to be saved are the ones that have been activated by the player since the last save. If you wanted to get even more specific, you could check whether any tiles in the ‘activated’ parts of the map have changed since previous save. For example, if you’re driving along a road it doesn’t need to re-save that road because none of the tiles changed in the few seconds you drove over it. That’s just my two cents and I have no idea how easy it would be to implement, but it would be very helpful in reducing save time 
(among other things I’m sure)
Hah… ole’ Deskpro here copes with rawtext chunks awrite.
The only sensible thing suitable to measure sandbox undertow encased with this game is really the For handle, the one that powers large world RPGs. You get to have a compressed save but the harddrive works that much harder - unless you’ve got a standby piece of hardware just for Scratch Drive purposes, the one that shouldn’t mess with your CPU usage that much. That way you get the data from the file as you close up on the game feature (let’s say a crashed aircraft, with zzzounds of detail) and the FOR principle lets you read every bit of information on query basis, with the “closest” of those being view_distance, view_port and (e)xamine. This allows an initial measure of data compression, too.
[quote=“TweedleGun, post:8, topic:4047”][quote=“Kevin Granade, post:7, topic:4047”]I hadn’t even thought of that, if you nuke maps.txt and restart it’ll keep the same overmap, but spawn a whole new set of overmaps. Yea that could indeed be a feature.
If you were really clever you could maybe use the coordinates to delete only the parts you don’t care about.
Anyway, I need to find some time to fix this, the game is stupidly loading all map data ever at start, and it doesn’t need to.[/quote]
Although you’re definitely much more knowledgeable on the issue Kevin, it would seem that the only parts of the map that need to be saved are the ones that have been activated by the player since the last save. If you wanted to get even more specific, you could check whether any tiles in the ‘activated’ parts of the map have changed since previous save. For example, if you’re driving along a road it doesn’t need to re-save that road because none of the tiles changed in the few seconds you drove over it. That’s just my two cents and I have no idea how easy it would be to implement, but it would be very helpful in reducing save time (among other things I’m sure)[/quote]
I support Tweedle’s idea wholeheartedly.
Something to try next time, is, if I can run this in a RAMDisk. Something to do when back home. Whee!
Although you’re definitely much more knowledgeable on the issue Kevin, it would seem that the only parts of the map that need to be saved are the ones that have been activated by the player since the last save. If you wanted to get even more specific, you could check whether any tiles in the ‘activated’ parts of the map have changed since previous save. For example, if you’re driving along a road it doesn’t need to re-save that road because none of the tiles changed in the few seconds you drove over it. That’s just my two cents and I have no idea how easy it would be to implement, but it would be very helpful in reducing save time 
(among other things I’m sure)[/quote]
Yea, muchly. Basically you need any map chunks where something is happening loaded into memory, and maybe a few more for performance reasons. Right now that just means the “reality bubble” around the player, there have been rumblings of making fire spread work better, which means pinning any tiles that are on fire into memory as well. Even better, once you leave an area, you can write the map chunks back out to disk, so there’s a very small amount to write out when you manually save. Even even better, this would allow us to do map load/generate/save more incrementally, so when you’re moving around, it would load/generate/save a few map tiles per step rather than a whole bunch whenever you cross a threshold, and if you stopped moving for a few seconds, it could use that slack time to get ahead and load/generate/save a bunch of them.
The thing holding this up is the fact that all map chunks are stored in one gigantic file (maps.txt), so you can’t just load a few chunks at a time. This needs some heavy-duty refactoring to let us save/load a reasonable number of map chunks at once. Or once I dig in it might end up being easy, you never know 
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:12, topic:4047”]Yea, muchly. Basically you need any map chunks where something is happening loaded into memory, and maybe a few more for performance reasons. Right now that just means the “reality bubble” around the player, there have been rumblings of making fire spread work better, which means pinning any tiles that are on fire into memory as well. Even better, once you leave an area, you can write the map chunks back out to disk, so there’s a very small amount to write out when you manually save. Even even better, this would allow us to do map load/generate/save more incrementally, so when you’re moving around, it would load/generate/save a few map tiles per step rather than a whole bunch whenever you cross a threshold, and if you stopped moving for a few seconds, it could use that slack time to get ahead and load/generate/save a bunch of them.
The thing holding this up is the fact that all map chunks are stored in one gigantic file (maps.txt), so you can’t just load a few chunks at a time. This needs some heavy-duty refactoring to let us save/load a reasonable number of map chunks at once. Or once I dig in it might end up being easy, you never know :P[/quote]
Muchly indeed! That sounds fantastic if you could get it working. You guys seem to be doing a fair amount of overhauls anyway, so good luck on this one!