October 9th, 2020 Livestream

Snutt & Dylan Talk: Updating the save system

https://youtu.be/csjtm2DtURs

Topics

• Coffee Stainers > Dylan
• Features > Save System

Transcript

jalen is working on updating this our save system which I've talked about a lot on our show oh yeah but I have no idea why we're doing that why we're doing the save system yeah or why we're redoing it or changing it yeah I know roughly but I think you're better at explaining it because you're the one that's actually doing it yeah sure sure that's good logic, let's see I was actually thinking about doing that for this stream instead but this felt more, constructive because we need to get we want to get the engine up and going as fast as possible so I'm actually launching the editor now to see if it works, but it's on the other screen so you won't be able to see it unfortunately, but yeah we're changing the save system so right now everything that is saved has to be in persistent worlds or always loaded levels which means when you load the game it has to load like every destructible rock check to see if it's still there and all this stuff and it means that well for one it's bad for rendering because you have a lot of really far away calling objects it stopped us from adding features before because we didn't want to introduce more world actors that are always present which is just basically continually hurting performance so what I'm doing is I and this is actually, done-ish but it probably won't go live for a little while for behind the scenes reasons but, essentially now we can save these actors in the streaming tiles so when you load in like when you stream in a new tile we can have the actors in there verse having them in the always loaded worlds, and there's like 10 000 like actors that just are always there with from destructible rocks to slugs what have you spore flowers and that's bad we didn't like that but it is also a pain and there's a gonna be a migration process and that's a little bit of a little problematic and we also don't want to you know ruin people's safes so I do think we're going to have to have a little pow wow with the save editor though because that's such a nice tool but it's going to I was reminded because- I also was reminded because I saw anther here who's worked a lot on the satisfactory calculator site oh nice when we changed that, yeah so I said before we were we had one root set where we would serialize, everything down into like one archive and now we have a per level archive so each tile gets its own archive to get saved I most of the logic I think- I say this without having looked at the code for those things we'll translate and you'll just have to do some modifications to kind of redirect it but I think we'll also like we'll probably be helping out people that want to know the save archive structure and everything when the time comes this is still a ways off does that have any impact on like the save time in game, yes ish theoretically it's reduced because we're not having to save the world actors so every time a tile is streamed out it saves like it doesn't have it saves its archive it won't change the disk right time, which is actually not most the time anyway but, in my tests it was almost identical unfortunately but that was on massive factories and we're talking like 100 to 200 000 factory objects versus the 10 000 world objects that are no longer being serialized down so it was you know fairly insignificant when you're comparing those that scale so for people on smaller bases or slower computers you'll likely see an increase I can reduce I guess at reduce save time but yeah it's it's more it will get to that at some point there is yeah that was that's a separate task kind of it was while I was working on this it was I was finding places to optimize but we didn't want to make that the focus of that we want to get that working first and then right you don't want to introduce more bugs than you when you're completely overhauling such a key system like that