Save Games??

[Marius42]

I've been playing Oblivion for almost 30 hours saved up now, and in Wyre I was looking at all my saves and noticing a gradual increase in the file sizes. My first saves, at 30 minutes and 2 hours, are 1.5 and 2.5 MB respectively.

 

Now, however, my saves are all the way up to 6.2 mb, with a high of 6.7 mb!

 

I had a corrupted save a while back, but I use Fast Saver so I just kept playing and the next save wasn't corrupt so I figured nothing was wrong.

 

But now, looking at how big my save games are, I'm not so sure!

 

I was just wondering how big saves can get, safely? And how do you know if your whole game is corrupted? Wyre says that all the rest of the saves are all good, and they load properly, etc. But just cautious.

[AltreU]

I'm not sure how big they can get, but if they bloat too much, it'll cause corruption. There's a tool to remove bloating and other possible causes of corruption in Wryes repertoire of apps. Just right click on your save and it'll be there, if you didn't already know.

[Shadowfen]

I've been playing Oblivion for almost 30 hours saved up now, and in Wyre I was looking at all my saves and noticing a gradual increase in the file sizes. My first saves, at 30 minutes and 2 hours, are 1.5 and 2.5 MB respectively.

 

Now, however, my saves are all the way up to 6.2 mb, with a high of 6.7 mb!

 

I had a corrupted save a while back, but I use Fast Saver so I just kept playing and the next save wasn't corrupt so I figured nothing was wrong.

 

But now, looking at how big my save games are, I'm not so sure!

 

I was just wondering how big saves can get, safely? And how do you know if your whole game is corrupted? Wyre says that all the rest of the saves are all good, and they load properly, etc. But just cautious.

 

I have a character at 590 hours whose save game is 12mb. How large your save game can get will depend on how heavily modded your game is, and in some cases which mods you play since some mods have been known for save game bloating.

 

Corrupted save games don't load or run and cannot be recovered in most cases. Get in the habit of frequently making new saves rather than saving over an existing game. That way it won't hurt quite so much when your latest save turns out to have been corrupted.

[AltreU]

^Making new saves is always a good idea if you can organize them.

 

Luckily Wrye has just the tool for that. Simply create new profiles with some organizational function and there you go.

[lich39]

Probably a stupid question, but what means when the save game gets "bloated" ?

[Tomlong54210]

Bloated saves are full of duplicated data, usually caused by a bug. They may also include dead data that should've been cleaned out. The best judge of if a save is too big is if the difference between its size and the size of the previous save differ by much more than the difference when look at other saves. Increases in save file size are gradual. If your saves remain growing gradually, that is fine.

[lich39]

I see. Well I haven't had problems with corrupted saves, only once, when the computer crashed during auto-saving. Luckily, I had a previous save which wasn't very far before the corruted auto save.

[Megatarius]

Never use Auto Save. Just get in the habit of saving before you enter a door, after a big fight, and a few other situations.

[Tomlong54210]

Never use Auto Save. Just get in the habit of saving before you enter a door, after a big fight, and a few other situations.

I was just about to say that. Yes, do not use Oblivion's built-in auto-save features. Using Streamline's auto-save feature is fine. Another alternative is Kuertee's Auto save and time mod.

 

Oblivion.ini Tweaks - http://tesivpositive.animolious.com/index.php?page=oblivion_ini_tweaks <-- Turn off those settings,now.

[Marius42]

Yeah I use the Fast Saver plugin to make my saves, so all my saves are new. I do saves every 3 minutes, and after 100 new saves I go through and clear out most of them, keeping one somewhere in the middle for an archive.

 

I hadn't thought to turn Autosave off. Doing that now. Are quicksaves okay? I usually quicksave before a big battle, or before entering/exiting if I haven't crashed in a while.