Posted: 11/1/2017 2:48 AM
Post subject: [Dolphin] Why are .sav files so huge?
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JCBoorgo
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Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
So, I thought I should ask the question before continuing experimenting with Toadstool Tour. Why are the .sav files getting bigger and bigger? I've barely exited the menus and course selection and stuff, and one single .sav file is already a big 25MB. And, that size keeps increasing rapidly. Any efficient way of saving my hard drive, solutions to reduce size, or any comment/help for anything? Couple of sidenotes: I do know that .dtm are saved at the same time as .sav, and those .dtm are tiny in comparison, but I can't quickly load up a .dtm and jump in to resume TASing (that's what I think, at least). I kinda have to sit through the game playing itself until movie end and then resume, is that really the best thing to do if I wanna keep a decent history of saves?
Posted: 11/1/2017 2:50 AM
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Fog
Emulator Coder, Experienced player (641)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 459
Funny TAS of 2015
There's a lot of data to save and load when dealing with save states in Dolphin.
Posted: 11/1/2017 3:06 AM
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JCBoorgo
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Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
Should they ever reach a "cap" in size? Like, is there a point in a TAS where a .sav should stop getting bigger and/or slow down their size gains? Currently, my messing around have seen the size jump from 9MB when the game is still in the "before the player should press start for the first time" state to 23MB after doing some menus. This does seem kinda normal, but I hope that it doesn't increase as fast as the game goes on.
Posted: 11/1/2017 3:13 AM
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Fog
Emulator Coder, Experienced player (641)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 459
Funny TAS of 2015
JCBoorgo wrote:
Should they ever reach a "cap" in size? Like, is there a point in a TAS where a .sav should stop getting bigger and/or slow down their size gains? Currently, my messing around have seen the size jump from 9MB when the game is still in the "before the player should press start for the first time" state to 23MB after doing some menus. This does seem kinda normal, but I hope that it doesn't increase as fast as the game goes on.
When you're playing back the final dtm file, you won't need the .sav unless you're doing a TAS movie starting from a save state.
Posted: 11/1/2017 3:20 AM
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JCBoorgo
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Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
So, I guess I can safely delete old .sav when I'm confident that I can't optimize more. That should keep the TAS' folder at a manageable size. Thanks for the quick replies!
Posted: 11/1/2017 4:01 AM
(Edited: 11/1/2017 9:07 AM)
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TheCoreyBurton
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Joined: 10/14/2013
Posts: 335
Location: Australia
You can also try use a program like WinRAR or 7-Zip to further compress the old states. I'm not sure how much it'll shave off the file size (it might not be much, or any at all), and you'd have to uncompress them again before you could load them, but it could prove to be a safer alternative than outright deletion.
I'm not as active as I once was, but I can be reached here if I should be needed.
Posted: 11/1/2017 8:48 AM
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JosJuice
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Editor, Emulator Coder
Joined: 7/3/2010
Posts: 193
Location: Sweden
JCBoorgo wrote:
Should they ever reach a "cap" in size? Like, is there a point in a TAS where a .sav should stop getting bigger and/or slow down their size gains?
Yeah, after a certain point, they shouldn't grow much anymore. That's most likely the point where you get in-game, but there's no hard rule. The size depends on how compressible the data in the console's RAM is, so when the RAM is mostly empty because the game hasn't loaded much data yet, the savestates are smaller. GameCube savestates should always stay below 50 MiB and Wii savestates should probably stay below 100 MiB, but they'll usually be significantly smaller than that because they're stored in a compressed format.
Posted: 11/4/2017 8:23 PM
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JCBoorgo
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Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
Alright then, thanks a lot for all your answers!