FM/WWSM save size?

[Celeval]

How large should we expect the save game files to be, for Small/Normal/Large/Huge database sizes?

[Francis_Cole]

It will vary depending on how far you are into the game(+ how many leagues you are running), but as an indication 4 years into the game on large database my save game is around 200mb.

Cheers
Fran

[FrogMan]

and mine, in the middle of the 2010-11 season is at about 210mb, on a normal database with only England, top to bottom...

FM

[Celeval]

Good, thanks.

[Sharpieman]

I haerd there was a way to get rid of the pkm files so that your game would run a little faster, anyone know how to?

[FrogMan]

I haerd there was a way to get rid of the pkm files so that your game would run a little faster, anyone know how to?
I've heard/read about that somewhere and would be interested in knowing more about it. Saving now takes about 5-6 minutes and if I could cut down on that, I'd like that...

FM

[FrogMan]

bump,

Anybody ever tried this?

From what I can gather, you delete the .pkm files in the temp folder (once you've loaded the game as the temp folder is empty when no game is loaded) and it makes the game faster on loading and saving. Anybody?

FM

[3ric]

Yeah, I always did that when playing CM03/04 - haven't tried it with FM2005 though.

[FrogMan]

to follow up on that, it's the .pks files that can be deleted. They are in a temp folder, either at /program files/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2005/temp, or wherever windows XP defaults the temp file (which is where mine was) at something like C:\Documents and Settings\username\temp\Football Manager 2005 or something close to that (change "username" to whatever your username is on your machine. At home it was "owner" I think).

Anyway, this folder is emtpy when the game is not loaded, so you load your game, go to the desktop and to that folder and delete the .pks files. I'd point you to the formal SIGames forum posting by somebody from SI saying it's safe to do so, but their search feature is disabled right now. Anyway, there were 3500 of these files in my temp folder, for my current career which is in the middle of the 2010-11 season.

Size of my game file prior to making any change: 217Mb
Size of the 3500 files: 77.2Mb :eek:

From reading over at the SI forums, I knew that by deleting these .pks files I would be unable to view any match report/stats or 2D highlights. So I thought that maybe if I deleted the first 3000 .pks files I'd leave the last 500, so I'd have the last 500 matches available. So I did that.

Size of the 3000 files: 69.6Mb
Size of my game file after deleting the .pks: 144Mb

Went back to the game, saved and saw that it was now taking between 3 and 4 minutes to save, compared to more than 6 minutes prior to deleting the files. So it indeed saved a bunch of time to saving my game.

One thing though, it turned out that the last 500 .pks files don't designate the last 500 match in chronological order. I wasn't able to see the match report of about any of my league matches this season. For that reason, I went back to my bloated game file since I needed to check a few things in my most recent games. I don't think there's a way to decipher which game is what from the .pks files, so I may wait until the offseason to do it again, and I'll live with not having match reports, but I'll at least have them from the start of the season...

FM

Size of my game

[henry296]

FM,

Are their dates and times associated with the .pks. That might let you know which ones to delete?

[FrogMan]

nope, that's the thing. They're simply named "ms ####.pks" where #### is a sequential number that went from 0001 to 3500 for me, that's why I thought that keeping the last 500 would have been the right thing to do...

FM

[henry296]

I was thinking when you opened the folder in Explor there is a date Modified column. How about sorting on that field?

[FrogMan]

I was thinking when you opened the folder in Explor there is a date Modified column. How about sorting on that field?
nope, the files are all packed inside your game file and before you load your gamefile in FM2005, the temp file is empty. All the .pks files are unpacked when you load your game, so they all have the same date of creation, which in my case was all April 20, at about 8pm yesterday evening... So no way of knowing which is which...

FM

[henry296]

Thanks for the explanation.

[FrogMan]

Thanks for the explanation.
no problem. I'd really like to find a way, if only to be able to keep the last say 30 games of MY team. I couldn't care less about the Newcastle-Arsenal match that was played at the start of the season, but sometimes I'd like to refere to old games my team played against a given opponent...

FM