Concerning save files

[Chris]

It wouldn't be hard to get some compression without having a noticeable speed impact, if any at all. zlib compression is pretty good and pretty fast, and can be done on-the-fly. Particularly for slower HDs, it can actually be faster to apply a light compression so it waits less for the disk, than transferring the whole thing uncompressed over the bus.

[AnyOldName3]

I've ended up with gigabytes of Skyrim saves, despite them being under 20 MB each. Maybe a balance of both would be a better option than going for one over the other.

Or first check your saving habits that's a lot! How many saves do you have?

I think about 1700 or so. Many of them are kept in 7z archives, and lots of them must be less than 20 MB, as otherwise that would be ridiculous amounts of space used. There was a time when my Skyrim was modded such that it crashed about once every fifteen minutes, so I saved a lot, and I've had the game for years.

[Jyby]

I think about 1700 or so.

That's incredible!

[MiroslavR]

I think about 1700 or so.

That's incredible!

That's nothing. I have over 5100, although admittedly I have a terrible saving habit.

[AnyOldName3]

I just checked, and apparently I only have 1423 manual saves (it doesn't increment the counter for autosaves and quicksaves).

By the way, I've always avoided quicksaving in Skyrim, as I read years ago that there was an 'optimisation' which could cause big problems - basically, if the quicksave was made within a certain amount of time of another save, it would copy the previous save and only overwrite the current cell, leading to issues where you changed cell or triggered something in an adjacent one, which would then be amplified if you quicksaved repeatedly, as they'd all keep recycling data.

I have no memory of any evidence for this, but as it seems like the kind of sloppy programming Bethesda are notorious for, I've always regarded it as potentially dangerous enough to just avoid quicksaves altogether. I just googled it briefly, and now there seem to be people listing a bunch of other reasons why it's not a good idea, but all of them with reasoning that doesn't exactly follow.

Has anyone here got a deep enough understanding of the guts of the engine to weigh in on this?

[Chris]

I'm not aware of any credible evidence of quicksaves (or autosaves) being dangerous in any TES game. At best, they may not be reliable, but using them to augment manual saves should be fine.

[silentthief]

I'm not aware of any credible evidence of quicksaves (or autosaves) being dangerous in any TES game. At best, they may not be reliable, but using them to augment manual saves should be fine.

While I couldn't find anything from the official bethesda site, there are plenty of links that show up regarding this when googling 'morrowind quick save corruption'.

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php? ... d-working/

They say that corruption or save/load fails usually clear up if you delete the quicksave.ess file
Overall though -- the recommendation is to use quicksaves pretty much as Chris described.

ST

[wareya]

Do saves really save statics?

[Jyby]

Do saves really save statics?

Good question. I imagine they save the state of statics. e.g. door open