Anyway to reduce save file size?

[Billy1969]

You realize if you add up those you listed, you end up with a total of 271895 instances out of 485000. The elephant is the room is still missing.

 

I really got no idea what DynDoLod is doing that it needs that many instances, but if it is not showing significant growth, it should not be much of a cause for concern.

I.e. I would go through several previous saves of that playthrough and compare.

 

Yeah good idea, well the elephant that fills up the remaining instances is the sum of all the smaller mods in my load order about 2700 of them so even if 1 mod of those is only 0.1% of the instances if you do that * 2700 it adds up to a lot.

 

About Dyndolod I must specify that I didn't rebuild it for a long time now but as I didn't see any bugs in the lod or missing stuff I didn't even after adding a lot so I keep delaying it.

 

I don't like building dyndolod, it's first of all very time consuming with a load order like mine, 5+ hours on a very fast system give or take. But I'm also scared it's going to add even more instances after rebuilding it and make my save completely unplayable.... will do the compare thing first, that's going to keep me busy for some time still.

[scorrp10]

I dunno what you got loaded there with 2700 mods. But anything that's mostly cosmetic, should not generate any instances. You just might have to go through a save plugin by plugin, and see if you can find the culprit.

[Billy1969]

Okay, level 1 save just after racemenu character creation, note that this is my actual first save of this playthrough which I backuped:

 

Billy the level 1 Nord male, in Abandoned Prison on 004.30.51 (0/100 xp).

• Version string: null
• Form version: 78
• Time: Mon Aug 22 21:00:38 CEST 2022
• Total size: 43,6 mb (11,9 mb with LZ4)</li>
• Papyrus size: 35,8 mb
• ChangeForms size: 6,6 mb
• Total ScriptData in load order: not available

The savefile was successfully loaded.

• Read 11,9 mb in 3,4 seconds.
• SKSE co-save was loaded.

 

I went through every plugin, dyndolod instances are exactly the same as in the level 67 save, so yeah there are a lot of instances but they don't grow during gameplay. and of course skyrim.esm sits at 32k instances to start instead of the far bigger number at level 67, which is normal.

 

Problem is the papyrus section of the savefile, it's already 35.8Mb big, changeforms at 6.6Mb is normal I guess. I would want to see the contents in that papyrus section, I mean when the scripts load the first time in a new game, I think my game (the VM) is getting flooded and it overflows and dumps a bunch of unusable stuff in my savefile and it stays there as baked in bloat. I however have no idea how to get in there to look.

 

Also each time my savefile took a huge growth it was right after a script went haywire and the VM overloaded. For the times I was aware of this It happened once with dyndolod, once with js emissive eyes but more troubling several times with the dragonactor script when I killed a dragon but it's corpse fell of a mountain and I wasn't able to claim it's soul, the damn script replicated itself and put over 25k of suspended stacks in my save, which were cleanable with resaver but the papyrus section bloated a whole bunch of Mb each time it happened.... to be continued I guess.

[Billy1969]

Follow up to this old thread:

 

Started a new game with Dyndolod Alphja 3 built and activated: 47Mb uncompressed!!!! (I have many new land mods and choose the highest settings), that's level 1 standing in the alternate start prison.

Started a new game without Dyndolod: 30Mb uncompressed!!! Same modlist (without dyndolod .esp and .esm of course and the generated output deactivated), that's a difference of 17Mb lol!

 

Changeforms size are at 7.2Mb in both saves, the papyrus section however is where the 17Mb difference is: 22Mb without Dyndolod, 39Mb with Dyndolod.

 

My first save is still massive without Dyndolod though, but the difference is way more than I expected... sigh... should I say goodbye to my beautiful lods or keep them and max out the 128Mb save game limit for the third time.... argh.

[IskanderNexus]

I have the same Problem with a level 70 save and 1300 mods. I just touched 128 MB... what i don't understand is that sse engine fixes went to that number and is not expanded to 256 or 512 MB. Is this a restricton from Bethesda or is just nobody thinking about that solution ?

[Billy1969]

I have the same Problem with a level 70 save and 1300 mods. I just touched 128 MB... what i don't understand is that sse engine fixes went to that number and is not expanded to 256 or 512 MB. Is this a restricton from Bethesda or is just nobody thinking about that solution ?

Well the original uncompressed size was at 64Mb only, engine fixes when you activate the setting doubled that to 128Mb which was more than enough before the .esl or .esp-fe files where a thing, nowadays more and more people with massive load orders hit that barrier also. It's the final barrier that's still in place for Skyrim modding. To be honest only people like you and me with crazy load orders hit it, probably not a very big percentage of players.

 

I don't know if it's technically possible but I suspect it is, to raise it to 256Mb, but the engine fixes author isn't been active for some time now and if he ever updates I suspect it's going to be for the latest Skyrim AE version only, which wouldn't help in my case since I'm staying put on 1.5.97. There is no way I"m going to upgrade a load order of 4k+ mods with 251 esp/esm"s and 2933 esl's I worked on since 2016 lol, would take me months or maybe a full year, not going to happen.

 

Edit: BTW, I thought I was crazy but a guy on reddit claims he hit another barrier: 255 esp/esm + 4096 esl's lol I wonder how much Mb his new game save is.:D

Edited July 12, 2023 by Billy1969

[IskanderNexus]

 

I have the same Problem with a level 70 save and 1300 mods. I just touched 128 MB... what i don't understand is that sse engine fixes went to that number and is not expanded to 256 or 512 MB. Is this a restricton from Bethesda or is just nobody thinking about that solution ?

Well the original uncompressed size was at 64Mb only, engine fixes when you activate the setting doubled that to 128Mb which was more than enough before the .esl or .esp-fe files where a thing, nowadays more and more people with massive load orders hit that barrier also. It's the final barrier that's still in place for Skyrim modding. To be honest only people like you and me with crazy load orders hit it, probably not a very big percentage of players.

 

I don't know if it's technically possible but I suspect it is, to raise it to 256Mb, but the engine fixes author isn't been active for some time now and if he ever updates I suspect it's going to be for the latest Skyrim AE version only, which wouldn't help in my case since I'm staying put on 1.5.97. There is no way I"m going to upgrade a load order of 4k+ mods with 251 esp/esm"s and 2933 esl's I worked on since 2016 lol, would take me months or maybe a full year, not going to happen.

 

Edit: BTW, I thought I was crazy but a guy on reddit claims he hit another barrier: 255 esp/esm + 4096 esl's lol I wonder how much Mb his new game save is. :D

 

 

 

I tried to contact aers, but he is elusive :) .

 

I gave it another try at GitHub, we will see. Unfortunately i ran into some problems setting up Visual Studio with SKSE, probably because the description is from 2019 ...

 

I think, the main problem for most of us is not the amount of mods, but the time we play. When i start new, i have 8 mb or something like this ... ok, with dyndolod it ist probably closer to 20 i guess, but nothing crazy.

 

Edit: BTW, I thought I was crazy but a guy on reddit claims he hit another barrier: 255 esp/esm + 4096 esl's lol I wonder how much Mb his new game save is. :D -> wtf is he installing just everything ?

[7531Leonidas]

FWIW: the limit is actually 254 esm/esl. There is/was another thread on here that was touched the 4096 espfe limit.