How big can a save game get?

[Guest Brody_Peffley]

I was planning of getting 16 tb of space for my pc. But is it likely i'll use that space from kerbal space program? I want to do a large save game where I basically put bases on moons of planets. Big huge bases with large solar panels. Im purchasing a 250 watt processor 4.0 ghz. Which should be enough.... I plan on making the bases of 400 parts. (This computer isn't made just for ksp, Letting you know. I plan on useing it for servers and other things but for fun times like civilization v or minecraft tnt bombs.) And I have 32 gb of amd radeon ram. So yeah.

[ouch]

Well I don't know honestly. But keep in mind kerbal is a 32 bit program so it can't even go over 4gb of memory usage. (which isn't an indicator of max file size btw.)

On my computer which is an amd 6 core 1100t OC'd at about 4ghz, and a amd hd6970 with 2gb of ddr5 (stock clocked). (the system also has 16gb of 2000mhz memory)

The number one problem with kerbal is the unity engine it's built on. The unity engine fails at pretty much everything it tries to do. Including running 1000's of objects at once. So basically the game slows to a crawl for no reason on my machine. By no reason I mean my processor bounces between 40%-60% usage with no core ever going above 65%. My graphics card sits bored at around 40%-65% usage. The max part count for me is around 1000 parts before things turn into a slideshow...

So I highly doubt a save game could even get to 1tb before your frame rate drops off to nothing. So yeah good luck filling your universe with bases. Unity will likely crush your dreams. lol

Oh, there is also the bug where approaching other craft sometimes causes them to explode for no reason... It seems to get worse with more objects loaded into the physics range I noticed. That's not unity's fault though. (Well I don't think it is anyway...)

But have fun trying none the less

[Torminator]

You could have a cryogenically-cooled supercomputer, and you'd still get massive lag. KSP/Unity does not really have multicore support, can't use more than 4GB (more like 3.4 it seems) of RAM, and is rather poorly optimized to boot.

Also, save files are very simple. You'd probably require billions of objects before you got a save file that large.

[Motokid600]

How long you think before we get a 64 bit version?

[42undead2]

When they get it working and it's done.

[Dkmdlb]

16 terabyte hard drive? Yeah, should be fine...

[Dangerous_Beans]

the KSP save files look to be fairly efficient (i'm at work so i can't really tell); it just stores the location of each ship, the status of each part, a list of the parts and how they are linked. the memory intensive part is the textures and collision meshes of the parts, not the structure of the ships. so you could probably build entire munar cities without the save file getting too big.

also, a 250w 4.0ghz processor? what model is that? from what i've read the 4 core ivy bridge cpus will use around 200w at 5ghz, so 250w seems a little high. the 4960x apparently pulls 120w at stock clocks.

rating processors in wattage is also kind of strange.

a fast cpu helps with gaming, but due to the generally poor multi-thread support, going beyond a 3570k is kind of pointless. of course may change if you are doing things other than games.

[Amoun]

What Torminator said.

I am KSPing on a laptop (its an i7 with 16 gigs of ram and semi ok video card.) and it does not use the game fully. Less than 4 gigs of ram and 1 core, which is sad.

You can have a super-cooler psycho-overclocked computers and the game will only use 1/10th of it whether you want to or not...which sucks.

I try to not go over 400 parts per craft. It's laggy but still very playable. And I do not think you need to worry about safegames, they are not that huge (not sure what exactly but they arent as far as i know)