That sounds a bit overkill, is it every second when you change player position? Or every time you complete a puzzle?

it seems to be literally every second regardless of action. This is a major programming oversight that will need to be fixed before offline mode is viable for anyone using an SSD.

Hopefully they care, it should be as easy as adding a setting to force a different save interval

How do we know for sure that's what it's doing?

Originally posted by garbo:

How do we know for sure that's what it's doing?

Your save file is located at %LOCALAPPDATA%\IslandsofInsight\Saved\SaveGames\OfflineSavegame.sav

You can simply right-click and select Properties in a rapid fashion to see that the "last modified" stat is changed every second - coinciding with the horrible stutter in game (one that does not occur in online mode).

It is also a standard UE4 save file (you can even edit it with some publicly available tools). Given the rigid structure of its format there's no chance it gets appended or modified, the whole file gets rewritten, no way around it.

Lmao, this game just can't stop being a disaster

Other weird things i noticed w/ procmon

- it also writes to multiple times a second, and calls FlushBuffersFile for good measure, just to really make sure those writes hit the hard disk

- it reads like 100 times a second for some reason lol

People can correct me here, but I believe such text file writes/reads involve far less data than the save game file, and are going to be much less of an issue. My Everquest text log file gets written to in a similar fashion. (Now maybe that shouldn't be on my SSD either, but just thought I would bring that up.)

I set up a ramdisk with ImDisk and there's still the stuttering like clockwork on the 1s mark. Unplayable :(

Wow that's really inefficient. All I'll say is that modern SSDs don't have quite the same issues earlier ones did.

A 'solution' to the massive rewriting of the savefile is you can just make the file read-only, and then remove the read-only attribute tag to save.. this can be done automatically with a Windows .bat script, creating a 90-second autosave feature of sorts.


its admittedly a bit of an insane solution, but it 'works' (You do have to make sure it cycles before quitting the game).

The issue is... Even if I just set the file permanently as read-only my game does not stutter any less.

Seems like it's not writing to disk that causes it (not that it's any consolation for my SSD health), it's the formation of the save data itself that runs incredibly slow.

So slow in fact, that I legitimately cannot even imagine how you can screw up collecting just 13 MB worth of data on a (more or less) modern computer. For a game that hogs ~14 GB of RAM and most of my GPU, making a bunch of structures in memory (even every second) should be a drop in the ocean.

Whatever they do to dump the save data, they implemented it not just with blatant negligence of optimization but more like with a level of programming experience you'd see in an intern at best. Or simply put they legitimately had no clue what they're doing.

AND THEY RUN IT EVERY SECOND.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2071500/discussions/1/4406292251592323635/

I include a script you can run that will prevent it from destroying your SSD, just place it anywhere and run the .bat you created with the code I gave.

You have to stop this .bat or .cmd manually when the game has stopped. To close this .bat or .cmd file automatically when the game has stopped running, I have included tasklist
the tasklist line includes the title of the game so make sure the whole title is on the same line as tasklist (this is one line)
save everything between both ------- lines but not including these ------- lines:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@echo off
setlocal

REM Specify the file you want to protect
set savefile="%LOCALAPPDATA%\IslandsofInsight\Saved\SaveGames\OfflineSavegame.sav"

REM Loop indefinitely as long as game runs
:loop
REM Make the file read-only
attrib +r "%savefile%"
echo File is now read-only

REM Wait for 60 seconds (change this value as needed)
timeout /t 60 /nobreak >nul

REM Make the file writable
attrib -r "%savefile%"
echo File is now writable

REM Wait for 5 seconds (change this value as needed)
timeout /t 5 /nobreak >nul

REM Go back to the start of the loop while the game is running
tasklist /V /FI "imagename eq IslandsofInsight-Win64-Shipping.exe" | find /I "Islands of Insight"
if "%ERRORLEVEL%" EQU "0" goto loop

REM Make the file writable
attrib -r "%savefile%"
echo File is now writable

endlocal
exit 0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I see that the set savefile= command already includes a pair " so the attrib command should not include "%savefile%" because that will be expanded to a pair "" that makes 4 "
(meaning 2 " before the filename of savefile and 2 " after the filename),
so that should be
attrib +r %savefile%
attrib -r %avefile%