When the game saves in D2R

[maxicek]

I have been running LK again with a new untwinked character, and using @silospen run counter.

silo's run counter indexes when the character file is saved. This was all very simple in 1.14d as the game only saves every six minites or so, or when you save and exit. If you are doing runs that take longer than six minutes, you can set the run counter to count every two runs as one run.

The problem is that D2R doesn't save in quite the same way, I knew that D2R saves on the character screen, but this didn't seem to be very consistent. I thought it was doing it every run, so this batch of LK runs I actually timed myself with a stopwatch to check the counter. Based on these results I set my run counter to index 2 saves as one run. But last night my average run time was creeping up and it was obvious that I was now counting two runs as one.

So I decided to investigate a bit. I set the run counter going indexed to one run and played on a second screen so I could check to see when the game saves.

Action	Saves?
Clicking the Play button with the mouse*	Yes
Pressing Return / Enter key instead of clicking the play button*	No
Selecting difficulty by clicking with the mouse	No
Pressing a key to select difficulty	No
Speaking to NPCs	No
Asking Cain to identify items**	Yes
Getting item repairs	No
Buying items from an NPC	No
Taking a Town Portal	No
At some (un-determined) time interval	Yes but not tested yet
Save & Exit	Yes

* At one point I thought saving on the character screen was time related, but it seems to only happen if you click the Play button with the mouse
**It saves every time he identifies. So if you drop some items on the ground in town, and ask him to identify twice, it saves twice.

So the reason my run counts were messed up were because I started pressing return instead of clicking the difficulty.
So I'm going back to one save per run, but probably need to factor in an allowance for Cain visits. This will probably add 20% to my actual run count.

Incidentally, my new favourite method for selecting difficulty - I have mapped H to a thumb button on the mouse. Hopefully less chance of me starting in Nightmare now, although not zero...

I haven't investigated everything yet, would be good to gather data from everyone and add to the first post.

 

[Arparrabiosa]

I reported this problem way back this problem with silospen run counter. I didn't check why it was saving more than once, though. It messed my records too, showing an average time that was lower than my actual times back when I was running TS + Pindle. I used the total time recorded by Silo's counter and divided by the average time calculated by Oskros MF run counter to have an estimation of the real runs I did. Seems like I did only around 80% of the total runs shown in Silos' counter.

 

[maxicek]

It is probably more accurate to call silos's run counter a save counter. Oskros does the same thing in a slightly different way IIRC.

So I think we need a different mechanism to count the runs. You could index every time the H key is pushed for example, with maybe a bit of allowance for double hits within a few seconds.

 

[Arparrabiosa]

Oskros has an auto mode that tries to counter saves and doesn't work at all. But it can record the runs manually, assigning a shortcut, and that's what I did. Not the most comfortable option, but hitting a key combination in loading screens was not that bad.

 

[NorthDakota]

Did you check when opening the stash? I'd be curious about both opening the stash and opening the shared stash, I'm fairly sure opening one of these saves.

One interesting thing I would love to see worked out is why when you're on the character screen you can't use gomule, changes to characters won't be saved properly. Obviously saving itself isn't so straightforward, there must be some temporary location the character's state is held and then written to the save files later on.

 

[Arparrabiosa]

Silospen Counter was showing that my "best run" was only a couple of miliseconds long, so something is messed up.

 

[Noodle]

Silospen Counter was showing that my "best run" was only a couple of miliseconds long, so something is messed up.

To be fair, that would be a VERY impressive run.

 

[maxicek]

Did you check when opening the stash? I'd be curious about both opening the stash and opening the shared stash, I'm fairly sure opening one of these saves.

I will do some more experimenting this week. I didn't test this explicitly, but I didn't observe anything either.

One interesting thing I would love to see worked out is why when you're on the character screen you can't use gomule, changes to characters won't be saved properly. Obviously saving itself isn't so straightforward, there must be some temporary location the character's state is held and then written to the save files later on.

From what I have seen, my guess is the last character is kept in RAM between games. If that is correct, we will always need to exit completely.

 

[NorthDakota]

From what I have seen, my guess is the last character is kept in RAM between games. If that is correct, we will always need to exit completely.

I just hate exiting the game SO MUCH.

It's so annoying that it makes me want to play d2lod, the convenience of muling freely on the char select screen is SO NICE. Especially given the fact that shutting down and starting up D2R is slow. Right now I waste so much time, even using what I feel is the fastest way of muling -- I use the shared stash as dump tabs, so I just dump everything in there when inventory/cube full, then when shared tabs are full, I exit and gomule.

I spose they hold chars in RAM because otherwise our load times would be even longer. When you think about it it's actually kind of impressive that the load times are so quick by comparison to other modern games, even if its slow by d2 standards.

So every now and again I swap back to d2lod, but then it's just like so many things I miss about D2R T.T

 

[maxicek]

Yeah, I keep running over gold in 1.14d and wondering why it doesn't pick up

 

[NorthDakota]

Using silospen run counter:

• advancing quest step - no
• completing quest - sometimes?
  • imbue - yes
  • personalize item - no
  • free barbarian prisoners - no
  • radament's lair - no
• killing act bosses (not quest completion, just killing again) - no
• killing act bosses and completing quest and finishing act, going to next act - no
• 5 minutes elapsed - yes

 

[Kruemelmonschda]

Probably nitpicking, but the game saves every time an item is identified, not just using Cain.

 

[DarkMaster]

Yes, D2R characters are kept loaded in memory as long as the game is running. I wish it wasn't the case but alas it is.

I also wish load times weren't tied to framerate for who knows what reason, I'm not gonna run my computer harder just to speed up the load times.

 

[coju]

Yes, D2R characters are kept loaded in memory as long as the game is running. I wish it wasn't the case but alas it is.

I also wish load times weren't tied to framerate for who knows what reason, I'm not gonna run my computer harder just to speed up the load times.

So, would loading another character remove it from memory thus able to mule on/off? Or would just utilizing the shared stash work for muling? Would it be like hot-muling?

 

[DarkMaster]

So, would loading another character remove it from memory thus able to mule on/off? Or would just utilizing the shared stash work for muling? Would it be like hot-muling?

Sorry for the late reply, all characters and the shared stash are loaded into memory at game initialization (when you open D2R, you don't even have to start a game with a character) and they aren't unloaded until you exit D2R.