Has there been any changes to save format?

[Junna]

I noticed as my hard-drive space ran out, that, for some reason, my save games from the server map I have been playing on singly, have now reached an almost monstrous size; they have climbed from 50 mb to 850mb and above, occasionally reaching 1.2GB, for a single save alone. Has there been any changes to how things are stored, is there a bug, or is that expected?

[ACarlotti]

There was a change several months back to allow saving path explorer data to avoid having to recompute it upon every load or server join. The data usage in an uncompressed save file would be approximately 6 bytes per ordered pair of halts, for each category/class, plus a bit extra for work-in-progress. For example, if you have 5 passenger classes, 2 mail classes, 5000 halts with passenger service and 4000 with mail service, then that would give a total contribution to the save file size of 5*5000*5000*6+2*4000*4000*6 bytes, i.e about 942MB. However, save files are usually compressed, which reduces this size somewhat.

I think you should be able to switch off saving path explorer data by setting save_path_explorer_data = 0 in simuconf.tab, although I'm not sure whether this applies to existing games - you may need to edit the setting ingame to do that (I'm can't remember right what key you need to reach that settings menu).

[Matthew]

you may need to edit the setting ingame to do that (I'm can't remember right what key you need to reach that settings menu).

The key is "i" in pak128.Britain-Ex.

[Junna]

Ah, that is good to know in case I need to upload it.

For reference, the actual number of stops is 9,752.

[jamespetts]

You could also make sure to enable compression for saving data just in case you had turned this off for some reason.