Are we likely to see the save feature improved

[Thufar]

Good night! I remember the times when autosave didn't exist. You could play for hours and not remember to save, get killed and ...
Just count your six second autosave blessings.

Regards,
Thufar

[jakotheshadows]

I honestly don't mind the save times. I just want 2 things:
Thing 1: A progress / percentage indicator on the save, so I don't get the feeling of being trapped in the amber of frozen time while waiting for it to finish, and instead at least have something to look at.
Thing 2: When an autosave occurs, the AUTOSAVING GAME message needs to be shown over all UI elements including the map. So many times I thought the game was freezing up until I squinted to see through the map that it was just saving.

[Requiemfang]

Auto-save wouldn't be such an issue if it didn't save in the most inappropriate times like in the middle of a battle or 5 seconds away from you blowing up. I miss the auto-save from XR where you docked and it would save, that's an auto-save feature that isn't frustration inducing.

[CaptainX4]

The game universe is a complex thing and saving it does take time, regardless of format. As various people have noted, it's a lot quicker on a faster drive because of the size of the file, but there's still a lot of work to be done to extract everything that needs to be saved. And yes, the game does have to be paused, otherwise you'd have an inconsistent dataset as things changed from one frame to the next while the save progressed.

you can copy the momentary data into a memory segment, then let the game go, start converting and saving the data. hardly copying coordinates, command and some values should take more than miliseconds, games far bigger than X4 doesnt take this much time to save. also, parsing into xml is a pointless and time consuming activity. its all about proper planning, nothing else

[shealladh]

The game universe is a complex thing and saving it does take time, regardless of format. As various people have noted, it's a lot quicker on a faster drive because of the size of the file, but there's still a lot of work to be done to extract everything that needs to be saved. And yes, the game does have to be paused, otherwise you'd have an inconsistent dataset as things changed from one frame to the next while the save progressed.

I would have thought that a better way would be to extrapolate the data and save as things are being done.
ie. Timeline and past events in a log that is separate, and accessed when or if you look at the timeline only. Past missions and all that, found ships, etc. save and logged then retrieved when required.

Could there be a better way to do this?

Not too fussed overall, but noticed it's getting slower as the game moves forward.
Looking within my own save (from time to time) there is a lot in their that could be better suited as separate data files.

In the end saving the same data over and over again seems weird imho. Reading the data is quicker across the board.