| Purge your savegames |
| Freitag, 03 Juni 2005 | |
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Introduction Over the time, savegames in Painkiller can become a problematic topic. The game creates a lot of savegame folders, which may be critical if there are too many of them. Sometimes weird things can happen like you can't save anymore or the last savegame gets overwritten all the time by the next one. Most of the savegame folders Painkiller creates are empty though and can securely be deleted. Also, when you upgrade to version 1.61 or higher, you can't use older savegames anymore (despite auto saves). They even are not visible in the save/load menu, but they are still physically available, eating up your hard disc space and maybe causing problems due to the sheer number of them. Having several hundred savegame folders is pretty common, even if you just have 50 or less saves that are still usable in-game. Savegame Compactor Some time ago I wrote a small tool called "Savegame Compactor" to spare me the hassle of going through all of the savegame folders manually. I thought that maybe others find this small application useful too and improved it a little bit. Here it is. When you start Savegame Compactor, it tries to retrieve your Painkiller directory from your registry. Usually this should work, but if for some reason the correct path doesn't show up or if you want to use this tool on a different savegame folder (like a backup of your savegames or a second Painkiller installation), then fill in the path manually. Also check if you've got Painkiller version 1.61 or higher installed. Once the correct path is selected, Savegame Compactor does a little analyzation of all the available savegames. If you changed the path manually, click the "Analyze" button to refresh this information. You can see that out of 660 savegame folders in my Painkiller directory, 568 are empty and another 45 are old saves that I can't use anymore with 1.61+.  Depending on which version of Painkiller you've installed, you have several options to choose from. "Deleting empty folders" does what it says. "Rename folders" rearranges folders after cleanup, for example 004, 005, 008, 009, 012 will be renamed to 001, 002, 003, 004, 005 at the end. These two options should be turned on all the time. The last one ("Delete old saves") will remove all savegames made prior to version 1.61. You can select to keep auto saves, because these still work in newer versions too. Savegame Compactor can also convert these savegames to the newer version for you. Once you press "Compact!", your desired actions will be performed. Attention: I highly recommend to make a backup of your savegames first! Although I've used this tool quite long and it never caused problems for me, you may come across errors that may result in unexpected results. I take no responsibility for lost savegames or similar things! After you made sure everything works fine, you still can remove your backup.  After the cleanup (should only take a second or two), you will be presented the results and your savegame folder will be re-analyzed. After compacting, I only had 47 folders left. Download Savegame Compactor uses Microsofts .NET Framework 2.0. Usually you should have it installed already through WindowsUpdate. But you can also download and install it manually if you need to: .NET framework 2.0 (English) 22.4 MiB To run Savegame Compactor, just download and extract the following zip file into any folder and double-click SaveGameCompactor.exe: Savegame Compactor 1.2 (13 KiByte) Have fun! |
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