ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hey everyone, I know the game saves every time to avoid cheating, so I'm really sorry to create another topic about this

I enjoy this game so much that I decided to help the developers - became a donator -, but for some days already, I've been sitting here watching the game save more often than I play it. There's an option to play while saving, but trust me, it's better to wait until it finishes saving

Is there anything to improve saving times, or maybe just disable it for a while?

I managed to make my saves last a long time with the settings. Basically what I did was use only save on background but not the other save thing. It helped the saving part immensely.
Sadly I'm not on computer right now too check the exact settings but I'll post them when I get on unless someone answers before that.

Yes, that has been an annoyance to me since forever with the game, i doubt it has to do with "anticheating" because it would be completely insane to make it working that badly then.
The fact that the longer your current play session is the more time the save will take does add into it.

The save in background is unfortunately not really better, because in most populated dungeons, during the time the save is occuring in the background, there's an equally annoying lag to every commands.

I hope that's an area of the game that will be improved some day as i don't see that happening in other roguelikes, even multi-dungeons ones.

Checked the settings and it wasn't too complex. There was only two toggles in there. Enabled background save and disable the other.
I had both enabled and the saving was way worse, so disable it.

Robsoie wrote:I hope that's an area of the game that will be improved some day as i don't see that happening in other roguelikes, even multi-dungeons ones.

I agree very much. I'm very impressed with the game, it's really rich in interesting background stories, lots of cool and interesting classes, lovely music and so on.. but this is starting to get off-putting.

Enter town, wait 20 seconds for autosave. Shop, leave town, wait 20 seconds. I don't understand why all these autosaves are needed. Why is there no option to turn them off? How does this even prevent cheating at all? And how is it possible to take so long? This is a roguelike, not exactly a heavy graphics game.

It has nothing to do with cheat, it has to do with saving so you dont loose stuff if you crash and with memory saving (it saves each zone in separate files to not have to keep the whole game in memory, which believe is would be impossible).
As for not being a heavy graphics game, how is this correlated with speed of saving ??
It is slow because everything in the world is mutable, every single bit of grass, object, actor, zone, ... this is a huge amount of data.
Although what you describe is strange, on a remotely modern computer saving should be way way faster in the latest releases

I wonder if the default values for the autosave settings could be derived from the number/speed of available cores, RAM etc on first startup of the game?

My guess is that plenty of people are using "less than modern" hardware to play the game, hence threads like this.

EDIT: I should add that I really like the new save functionality, huge improvement on previous versions... but then again I have a pretty new computer

Yeah, my computer is pretty old, a pentium with Windows XP from.. 2004? Maybe that's the problem, idk. It does seem that it starts taking longer as your current session lasts longer, as Robsoie said. After exiting a game and reloading there seems to be less saving lag.

So it's a precaution to prevent losing your game to a computer crash, then? That makes sense, although I would personally prefer to disable this, even if it risks losing your character to power outage and such. So maybe this could be an optional setting?

Thanks for your answer in any case, and as I said, really a great game.

darkgod wrote:It is slow because everything in the world is mutable, every single bit of grass, object, actor, zone, ... this is a huge amount of data.

I am no programmer, but all the information is incremental - so the bulk of the savefile will be identical to the previous one. Can't you just add the new information.

To know what changed one has to examine it to find difference. This is the time consuming step, not the writting of a few MB / tens of MB of data to the disk :/

darkgod wrote:To know what changed one has to examine it to find difference. This is the time consuming step, not the writting of a few MB / tens of MB of data to the disk :/

I am a programmer. I have no idea how you currently are testing to find what changed in order to create a save, but from what you just said it seems like you're examining everything. What if, instead of checking to see what changed when you do a save, you proactively kept track of change? When something changes, fire an event to add it to a list. That way, come save time, there's no searching, only sequentially going through a list. I'm sorry if my suggestion is completely un-useful! I still haven't taken the time to look at anything under the hood of ToME. Can't stop playing it when I have the free time I guess

Not possible, you have no idea how much stuff changes constantly, it would be madness (and would utterly slow down the game by handling all this additional process) :/