The Autosave Feature - help or hindrance?

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I'm finding that the Autosave feature, while certainly useful in cases where you meet an unexpected demise, interrupts the flow of the game whenever you enter a party-required area.

The instruction to Quick-save frequently pops up anyway, and perhaps as a consequence of having died, you MUST reload to where you last Quick-saved instead of where the game automatically did it for you.

Help or hindrance, I'm positive I would recover 4 days of my life had Bioware not included this feature in the first place.

 

It's a good option, but sometimes kinda annoying. But when it saves you, you'll forget all the annoying things

 

Although it has its uses, I mostly find it annoying. On some computer configurations I've played the game on, the the process of saving takes forever to complete - for some strange reason. What causes this I have no idea (and clearing the cache doesn't help), but it's kind of gives the autosave a drawback... (Has anyone else experienced something similar, btw?)

 

I hope someone from Bioware is listening in.

 

Yep, the savetimes of the savegames are sometimes really VERY long, and have been longer in BG-1 on my old computer (133 P-1/ 64 MB). Now that I play BG-1 on my new one (650 K-7/ 128 MB) it´s much better.

The weird thing is that the savingtimes of BG-2 now have reached the level of old BG-1 on my old computer ... progress

 

It seems to be computer related in the ways of configuration or manufacturer. Played both BG1 and BG2 on a K-6 233 with no saving woes whatsoever. Installed it on a couple of P-III 500's (with more RAM), however, and the delay was simply intolerable...

[This message has been edited by Seric Exz (edited March 23, 2001).]

 

The save times are actually ok on my computer for BG2 but the load takes ages Anybody who did manage to succesfully decrease loading and saving times please share.

 

After a while the save time indeed become longer.... Don't know how but I have the same problem. Don't know how to solve it. The only thing I know is that yuou can lower the load-times by installing the whole version on your computer (2,5 GB space required) or to higher the cache.

 

Yep, full install really helps much. I also chose the no-cd patch for I don´t like to play the DJ - the only legitimate use for this ... tool - prevents the occasional bluescreen when changing CDs.

 

Defragmenting your disk might also help

 

ive never had a problem, takes a max of a second to save, then another second or so to load the next thing, then again, i just got a 1 ghz, so im sure that has something to do with it.

 

The number of saved games definitly has a strong impact. If you have more than 20 saved games, move those directories to a subdirectory (to be retrieved anytime later).
The second influence is RAM. With my new computer came ME and BGII ran acceptably with 128MB. Installing 2K slowed BGII down dramatically, especially loads and saves. It turned out my configuration passed the 128MB limit by some 3-4MB. This caused the system to clean up/allocate virtual-memory (pagefile.sys) ever so often. Adding some RAM cleared the situation.
If you have 2(or more) hard disks, it might help allocating discspace on ALL harddisks (space on two partitions on the same hd might make things worse (longer head moves)).
Having BG as only app helps reduce memory-consupmtion. If you are stupid enough to play mp3-songs in the background, don't be surprised if this costs you some dozens of MB (I prefered to invest into RAM instead of throwing out the music).