QCF Design Community

The Avatar mentioned there was a way of doing this and it would shorten the loading screens, and I need to learn the secrets of this dark sorcery.

I just opened my save's folder and there were 1900 files inside, half of them RUN files. Do I delete some of them? How do I know which ones I can delete without losing progress?

We were just discussing it, so I'll copy-paste what I said:

At the moment, the game load time depends on the big folder which has a string of numbers for a name. This folder contains the record of the runs. Deleting it allows the game to be played with all quest progress, but not dungeon completion saved.

So basically, you can move the contents of your folder (all the RUN and other files) somewhere else. Once the folder is empty, load times will be much reduced. The only adverse change to your gameplay will be that your dungeon progress (class completions, badges, etc) from your actual save file will no longer appear. However, the game will still be fully playable and quests seem to be tracked elsewhere in the code. If you want to "add" your two save files together (for example, to see a fully-rainbowed EE kingdom), you can just merge the old folder with the new one to get all your progress back (though of course doing so would also increase your load times a lot).

Make sure you back up your save before doing any of that, by the way. Also, I didn't catch your stream today, what did I miss?

Tower, can you send me your save file? Just the main one, not the folder with the run data in it. I may or may not have found a way to substantially cut down on load times, but I need more data to test on.

Just dropping my two cents here, but I am convinced that event if the problem is visible when you have many save files, the
root cause must be some inefficiency in the code that leads to a quadratic or cubic number of operations where there is no need. The save files contain almost no information (duration of the run, badges, survived?, won?, unique_id), and reading
1000 of them takes 40ms.

The problem must be in the game's code and the way it handles that. We will try to find the source of that inefficiency
and fix it for the next patch. Needless to say you'll need to backup your save more than ever...

Ah, so aside from rainbow progress I won't really lose anything from clearing out the run files? That's a bit sad, but now that I have the mod rainbowing isn't really important.

Avatar: to clarify, if I wiped the runs folder empty and then wanted to play Disposable Demonic Library again, I would just need to play regular Demonic Library first, but would not need to replay Disposable Shifting Passages, correct? If I wiped the runs when I was 3/4 of the way to completing something like the Shovel item unlock quest, would I still be one win away from unlocking Shovel, or would I need to do all four again? (EDIT: Tested the second question, partially-complete quests like that are reset to being 0% complete.)

shade: I didn't stream that day, or any day since. Lots of packing for move, and my new place's internet is a lot worse, so I'm not sure I'll be able to anymore :/ Still it was fun while it lasted!

KittenAqua: Sure, how should I send it?

srid: That would make a lot of sense, and would explain why the loading times seem to go from "minimal" to "super annoying" much more suddenly than a simple linear function of runs would explain.

I don't want to get your hopes up prematurely, but we seem to have solved the loading problem thanks to @KittenAqua's efforts. It still needs some testing, but hopefully we'll be able to get it out with the patch we're releasing soon to solve the new bugs that have been uncovered.

Also, since I don't think it's been stated yet, you should not wipe your runs folder. The runs stored in there are completely unrelated to the excessive loading times. If you email The Avatar your main save file we can fix the loading issue with no loss of progress.