It still feels like it should be orders of magnitude less. For example, if each piece of cheese has an ID number that maps to cheese, an ID for what area it's in, three coordinates for where exactly it is, and maybe a few more variables like how much of it you've eaten. Each of those variables is probably only a couple of bytes, so each item is probably only 20B or so, which means that even if you interacted with a million different items and there was no compression going on then that's still only 20MB of save data.

[–] tehevilone@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it's not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.

It was a lot worse with Skyrim's original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they're most likely to have poor data management in some mod.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Aha, so unexpectedly it's bad/inefficient code that's ultimately to blame

[–] iegod@lemm.ee 4 points 5 months ago

I wouldn't say bad, but inefficient might be fair. Unoptimized I think is more representative.

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