What is in a gamesave, that grows with time?

[Arnkell]

Is there some way to slim the saves down manually, only losing unessential data? I'm just a layman, but if the major part of my current 6.6 mb gamesaves are location data (dungeon textures, superfluous dungeon chest content lists), could it somehow be gutted so that only my personal data and conversation/quest data with individual npc:s remain? I can't believe my growing skill tree could take up more than a couple of bytes, that's only like "Archery 3=yes, sneak 2=no" or so.

 

I'm thinking of getting a SSD (maybe a Kingston HyperX), will that decrease gamesave load times? By what factor would it improve, have you noticed? Right now my loads take about five seconds, and I have a Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD, ATI 6950 2Gb card and a Intel E8400 processor. I can go 1920x1200 with 8xAA and 2xAF with 70fps, but the loading times are beginning to add up.

[Tom2681]

SSD does make a difference.

 

For bloated savegame files:

I'm no expert but I believe most of that is dropped weapons.

When NPCs die, there's a chance that their weapon will be separated from their corpse. Bodies are removed, weapons are not.

It takes a lot of space to save the location of every single weapon.

 

There's a mod called "possessive corpses" that can help you with that.

 

You're lucky with your 6.6 mb. I'm up to 11 megabytes with a level 13 character already.

[Arnkell]

Thanks for the tip, will try it out tonight! I know immediately of about 150 Forsworn rotting on the ground in about fifteen outdoor vistas and five dungeons, whose cheap weapons I never looted and who must definitely be taking up savespace.

 

Anecdote: the first time my guy decapitated someone, I tried picking up the head to play with it, then discovered it was still invisibly attached to the corpse and couldn't be moved without also moving the body. I reacted with "aww *sadface*", but now learning of the added gamesave-burden when separating objects from their source (as in them dropped weapons), I'm glad they chose to have the head "stick"! :.)