Request: loading times (and a proposed solution)

Gallowglass

Observed behaviour: when you have a lot of saved games (I already have about 800 in BGee), the game is very slow to load the list of saved games when it first starts up - it just sits there churning the drive for 2 or 3 minutes (with no message or explanation) before displaying the list. This appears to be because it is reading every savegame folder to extract the thumbnail of the saved position.

Proposed behaviour: add a background process to the engine, to index the savegames and pre-build a thumbnail file in the \save directory, running during pauses and other quiet moments of gameplay (and also adding the latest thumbnail to the file each time a game is saved). Then the startup process would only need to load the one pre-built thumbnail file instead of searching all savegames and extracting, so it'd be very much faster.

Jalily

I experience this too, and I have half as many saves as you.

Added to the tracker.

brtl33

Personally, I would love if saves were separated by character (like in Mass Effect). Then when you go to load, you could select the character and it would load saves of that character only. It would make doing runs with multiple characters a lot easier.

Jalily

@brtl33 Agreed. I made a feature request for that a looong time ago...

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/5879/separate-save-profiles-for-each-character

Madhax

Holy crap. You guys have a LOT more saves than I have.

mlnevese

And I thought my 20 or so saves were too many...

TJ_Hooker

I don't even know if I could ever amass that many saves. I can be a little obsessive about keeping things orderly, and have a tendency to periodically go through and delete any redundant saves, or playthroughs which I don't think I'll end up playing any more. I honestly can't remember ever having even as many as 10 saves for any game.

Dee

...I have five saves.

I'm pretty sure I'm including Quick Save and Auto Save in that tally, too...

Madhax

I have, like, twelve.

Gallowglass

Well, yes, I save quite often. Don't we always advise players to do that? (Haven't we all heard "There are only three places you need to save: before combat, after combat, and everywhere else"?)

I generally save at decision points - meeting new characters, entering a multiple-choice dialogue, confronting a scripted enemy, etc. Then if I later wonder what would have happened if I'd made a different choice, there's a save on hand to test it. Not that I actually do go back and try a different path very often, but it's there just in case, and I do sometimes do that ... or also if someone reports a surprising outcome here on the forum, I can load to a corresponding position and see what happens when I try to reproduce whatever was reported. (And in between decision points, I use QuickSave too, but obviously those don't get archived.)

@brtl33, @Jalily: I agree that saves partitioned by character would be a nice feature, but it wouldn't really solve the problem I'm talking about here. I'm accumulating more than 300 savegames per playthrough, i.e. per character, so it'd still be very slow if it has to do a search-and-extract through all of the savegames even for only one character at a time.