Originally posted by Rocksalt:

Originally posted by CHAO:

So I wrote a post before saying mods should optimize player save file sizes instead of re-drawing trolls over and over. Now my save file is 300mb and Steam Cloud only can hold 150, so now I cannot close Steam without turning my computer off and I can't play any other game because Steam still tries to sync the save file, but there is no space, so it's infinite. Any idea how to reduce the size?

I don't know much about this. Is having a save file over 300mb a bad thing?

If you want to know if a file format is bad just run a normal zip over it. The poorer the file format, the smaller the zip file will be -- that means it is full of redundant information, like xml tags or in binary format, empty spacer bytes or whatnot. Its not a perfect idea, sure, but its one way to know if the data is being stored somewhat efficiently. (the hard core compressors will make a smaller file but that isn't the point, zip's blandness actually helps here because it is finding things that likely could be fixed by the coder whereas the advanced ones may find things hard to eliminate).

you will note if you play with it that mp3, jpeg images, and things like that do not compress much. Those formats are already pretty solidly packed.
to save you some time, my main world went from over 60mb to 20. So the format is full of redundancy and inefficiency.