Post by Sniffles on Dec 15, 2018 1:48:05 GMT
I'm not waving a flag of how wonderful I am here. I'm the idiot who once needed room on her C: drive and moved 42 GB of saved games onto another drive. 42. Prophetic. Ask Arthur Dent. I had saved games from when I tried to run Skyrim on a Nvidia GT210. 9,000? 12,000? When your game crashes every 5-10 minutes you make a lot of saves.
I now have 12 saves in the game folder and 18 in a sub folder. The Format:
Baby NS.ess
-Vilja
--Inigo
Save 1 - ...
Save 2 - ...
--- SFSG <Quest started/completed>
...
Simplified. <char name> NS=New Start. A dash prefix -=Major milestone. Double dash is a following milestone. The Save <number> are the normal game saves. -Vilja, I added Vilja as a companion. --Inigo, Inigo added as well, a sub save to the Vilja which is a sub save of the Baby saved games. If I make a major change to the game it gets a double dash --. The SFSG triple dash is self explanatory. So Far So Good. It is more of a note to yourself and daily progress.
It takes a little time, a day or two of game play, to become familiar with this system. But the benefits far outweigh the little effort it takes to keep things regimented. It works like this:
WHEN MY GAME GOES TO HELL IN A BETHSEDA BUCKET... Stop kidding yourself. It's just a matter of time. Of course we all read those wonderful tales of 'my game has 1459 mods and has worked perfect out of the box for 35 years'. But usually people play on planet Earth. Sheeet happens.
The Logic.
* Generic game engine saved games are TEMPORARY.
* Triple Dash. Mostly used with 'Will my game crash today?' Will the game suddenly start lagging? Followers not following? Whiterun's textures are missing!' The game is becoming toxic. Scripts aren't executing. The game might not have loaded properly. Time to revert to the Triple Dash. If all is well after the NEXT DAY of game play the --- SFSG gets replaced by a new one. I also use --- SFSG+ after each new mod added. After each mod added you owe it to your sanity to fully test the entire game functions under a --- SFSG+ save. Mod fooks up, it gets unloaded, SFSG+ gets deleted and you restart with the --- SFSG.
* Secondary -- Saves. Important milestones. Major mod added or Major Quest completions. e.g. my above saves after some time playing:
Baby NS.ess
-Vilja
-Inigo
--Season Unending completed
-- Temp
-- Temp
--- Sophia added
--- SFSG Sophia
Save 436 - ...
Save 438 - ...
Note Inigo has become integral in the Baby character and was renamed to a single dash. Should I experience no problems with Sophia she can graduate up through the ranks. -- Temp saves. Just making sure everything is okay. Delete before the next game exit. In the above example, Sophia didn't get installed properly. Exited the game, deleted all after the first Temp, reloaded the mod and restarted. Sophia looks very very weird with solid black body textures which happened a couple of hours after the preceding SFSG.
Super Safe Saves.
Park all followers then move the PC alone to an indoor room without transition doorways and no storage chests. Have her/him face a blank wall. Make a saved game, of any flavor. Exit the game step by step completely. Open a large graphic image. Copy to the clipboard. Close the image. Open a text document .txt. Windows will probably ask if you if you want to save the stuff on the clip board. You don't. Shut down any open programs. Exit the .txt document. Make sure the HD light is off. Start Skyrim, load that previous save. Exit the game immediately. Restart the game. Immediately make another save that you will start the next session with. Exit the game.
WTF? Why the above. No followers=no ongoing scripts triggering prior to-during the save. Empty room without transition exits=No game triggers to be loaded. No LOD to be dealt with. Load image then text document=clearing the memory and virtual memory. Start and exit=Only the game will be in the memory buffers. Now that you've dusted, swept the floors and flushed the toilet, you can figure the new super safe save will have a minimum of immediate garbage to load along with your game.
It only takes a couple of minutes at the end of a game play day to do the housekeeping. But it will take about 200 hours to take the game from -Vilja up to Season Unending again. Decisions decisions.