The past few days I have been tweaking the save/load process trying to reduce the size of the save files and the time it takes to complete. I was able to cut the size of the save file near to half in size by abbreviating the name of multiple properties and by regenerating objects like sea travel routes after load instead of storing them.in file. Still though, the save process is extremely slow and I couldn’t find an easy way to make it faster. The culprit is cell group data. Cell groups are too data heavy (many internal properties and tables) and any advanced world can easily contain above 100,000 of these. My best guess as to how to solve this issue is by implementing incremental saves, which I more or less described on my previous post. Although, like I said, I don’t want to spend the next month or two just trying to implement an experimental save-file process that might not work at all. So it will have to wait for next year once I get to add first some more juicy features.

In any case, I already started with the wrap-up tests for 0.3.1. The slightly improved save-load process is stable enough and no obvious timeline divergences seem to appear right away, yet there are still some cultural property bugs that decided to rear up their ugly heads at the last minute. So I’m currently dealing with them as I continue testing. If everything goes right I will be able to release the new public build by Nov. 12.