Oolite Bulletins

I have probably already answered this question to myself... but... I have a game save (Cobra Mk III) of 48 kb , nice and lightweight.. but with the addition of station dock control that game save baloons to 400 + kb I assume therefore that the addition of some oxz's will laden your game saves which inturn will at some point effect gaming performance and indeed enjoyment. Or is that the Lethal Brandy talking again ?

It was a balloning save-file that first drew me into this forum - it was doubling every session.

SDC needs to store quite a bit of data, and it will vary based on the system you're currently docked at. A system with a lot of trade partners will have a lot of ships, so a lot of data needs to be stored in order to achieve all SDC is trying to achieve (persistence of information being one of the primary goals). Comms Log MFD also stores quite a bit. Wait, I'm seeing a pattern here - all my OXP's seem to be very data heavy...

The average save game file size I'm seeing is somewhere between 700K and 2MB. The biggest components in that 2MB monster are:
Gallery: around 22k
Comms Log: around 10k
Email system: around 150k
Smugglers: around 73k
SDC: around 1.7mb

I'm not aware of any issues with having so much data stored in the save file, but maybe someone who understands how Oolite handles memory can jump in here and describe things in more detail.

I don't think that the size of the save file would have any impact on game performance, other than taking a bit longer to load, of course.

Agreed, loading times appear to be the only factor.

How do you manage to get such huge save files?
I have games in version 76.1, 80 and 82. At least half a dozen in each. They all range from 60 - 80Kbs.

I've never noticed a load time difference from a new game with no saves to one with a couple of dozen saved files.

Very interesting.. What could be causing such huge differences?

Gonna put a stop watch on my bare game load and saved games load to see. Will post the times.

Do save files vary between formats; Mac, Windows and Linux?

Don't know about the different OS's. I have windows vista (A real pain)

76.1 with all saves loads in 45s
80 with saves loads in 1m 10s

Had forgot I deleted 82 because I really didn't like the trading markets. They really should have been an oxp/oxz not a fixture.

I have noticed that a few of the anti-virus progs really mess with game load times. A couple of them actually have 'Game mode" settings.

Still no idea why there would be 100's Kbs for a save game??

Alex wrote:

Had forgot I deleted 82 because I really didn't like the trading markets. They really should have been an oxp/oxz not a fixture.

Sorry, I must have missed something despite playing a lot... what was it you don't like about 82?

82 really changed the trading markets
Really stuffed my game,
So I play 80 with the newer stuff I like that will still run.
Hopefully the fixtured penny ant markets of 82 will be put to oxp/oxz status by 83

I have played Elite before it was a game you could buy.

Oolite since 1.65

Please put the markets back, and have major changes like that as oxp/oxz'ers

A while back there was an addon "Real markets" and another "Real Ship yards"

You could run them if you wanted. They didn't change the base game

Just out of curiosity: What has changed? I only know Oolite 1.82 and C-64 Elite, but I don't see significant differences in the markets. But that's perhaps because I never took trading too seriously.

1.80 to 1.82 held a massive change to the markets. That was quite thoroughly discussed in the boards and to my recalling the consensus was that the change was good and sound.

The old system used cryptic commodities.plist definitions to define the markets. To understand how those worked required at least two higher degrees of education. And all markets were limited to 127 units.

The new system uses easily understandable rules in shipdata.plist or if preferred via market scripts. Also the capacities of the markets are now fully tweakable.

The downside is that the new system is not compatible with the old system. So any old station with commodities.plist has no market. It requires that someone redefines the market using the new system. For many popular OXP stations this has been done and for the rest I have written a straightforward howto somewhere on the board. Someone just has to do the conversion.

I don't see any reason for bringing the old system back, the current system is much more flexible and from an OXPers point of view a million times more usable and understandable.

So Alex, again, if there's some single market that bugs you, please point it out and something might be done about it. I already did an oxp to bring back the old and bigger hermit markets.

The market changes were tested and discussed also on github before importing them into the mainline of 1.82. The feature notes, dscussion and a list of changes is included in the github pull request #109 page. Like spara said (and as you will see if you skim through the pull request info), the new system is a huge improvement over what we've had before and allows expandability of the markets and trade goods handling in a way that was simply not possible before. I suggest using an OXP to simulate a revert to the old commodity schemes if one is not happy with the way it is now - not sure if such an OXP exists already somewhere or it's still to be created just re-read spara's post, looks like something of help may be out there already. But I find it extremely highly unlikely that this will ever be reverted to pre-1.82 status. That would just be a step backwards IMHO.

Alex wrote:

82 really changed the trading markets
Really stuffed my game

But how? How has it stuffed your game?

Alex wrote:

I have played Elite before it was a game you could buy.

Wow! You know David and Ian personally? What were the early builds like?