Beginners' Guide to Savegame Editing with Near Infinity

[subtledoctor]

11 minutes ago, mickabouille said:

For me, it takes minutes. For an early BG1 saves (of an EET heavily modded game).

So much that it's practically unusable (because just opening NI is also timed in minutes).

My trick: install Generalized Biffing. Not because you need it for gameplay, but just to improve NI’s performance. 

I want to keep a pristine unbiffed copy of the game for iOS, so I actually make a copy of the whole game folder, and biff the copy. Then I use the copy to inspect things in NI, and still have the original to restore my game on iOS if need be. 

[argent77]

21 minutes ago, mickabouille said:

For me, it takes minutes. For an early BG1 saves (of an EET heavily modded game).

So much that it's practically unusable (because just opening NI is also timed in minutes).

That's quite unusual. Are you using a current NI version? Some older versions had issues with a great number of files in the override folder.

However, other factors could also play a role, e.g. slow harddisk, security software interfering with file operations, etc. Biffing the override folder should help a lot in these cases though.

Edited September 5, 2022 by argent77

[mickabouille]

That's v20220408

The most I can say is I am on linux and the game is inside a loopback device (ext4 with casefolding) and I launch it with -i (otherwise it doesn't work at all)

[mickabouille]

2 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

My trick: install Generalized Biffing. Not because you need it for gameplay, but just to improve NI’s performance

One word:  whoa!

NI startup is now... not quite instant (java) but reasonably fast (a couple seconds).

Loading a .gam is now around 15 seconds.

Really, thanks!

[argent77]

26 minutes ago, mickabouille said:

That's v20220408

The most I can say is I am on linux and the game is inside a loopback device (ext4 with casefolding) and I launch it with -i (otherwise it doesn't work at all)

That's even stranger. Maybe using the loopback device has some side effects?

On my Linux test installation (ext4 casefolded, on ssd partition) NI starts up in about 3 seconds with override folder containing over 13k files.

Btw, option -i has been removed some time ago. It should have no impact on starting NI anymore.

[mickabouille]

Ah yes, that's also on a SSD, with JDK 11, with 16G ram. Nothing else I can think of that could have an influence...

 

19 minutes ago, argent77 said:

Btw, option -i has been removed some time ago. It should have no impact on starting NI anymore.

Nice to know, less things to type

[mickabouille]

Ah yes, maybe one that was  too obvious :

mick@piurifayne:~/Games/bg2/game$ ls -1 override/ |wc -l
107792

 

[subtledoctor]

Yeah I've got around 100,000 files in /override as well. If I try to use NI with that folder unbiffed, it takes about 10 minutes to open, and my laptop's fans go to full blast and before I can even look at any files my battery has dropped by about 30-40%. Also on a fast SSD, with 16GB RAM and a modern 4-core processor.

[argent77]

4 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Yeah I've got around 100,000 files in /override as well. If I try to use NI with that folder unbiffed, it takes about 10 minutes to open, and my laptop's fans go to full blast and before I can even look at any files my battery has dropped by about 30-40%. Also on a fast SSD, with 16GB RAM and a modern 4-core processor.

I was curious and wanted to see how 100,000 files in /override affect NI's startup time. So I tested it on my Windows 10 system, as well as on Linux and macOS virtual machines.

This is what I got:
Windows: 12 seconds (SSD), 63 seconds (HDD)
Linux Mint VM: 12 seconds
macOS 'Catalina' VM: 32 seconds

It's a fairly recent desktop system, which is probably faster than a laptop. But that alone can't explain the huge timing difference.

[subtledoctor]

23 minutes ago, argent77 said:

I was curious and wanted to see how 100,000 files in /override affect NI's startup time. So I tested it on my Windows 10 system, as well as on Linux and macOS virtual machines.

This is what I got:
Windows: 12 seconds (SSD), 63 seconds (HDD)
Linux Mint VM: 12 seconds
macOS 'Catalina' VM: 32 seconds

It's a fairly recent desktop system, which is probably faster than a laptop. But that alone can't explain the huge timing difference.

Maybe there's a difference between just dumping files in /override, and installing mods? Maybe in-file links to dialog.tlk, and IDS tables and other  things that NI has to link up, matter? Maybe if the files are biffed NI can just read that data from chitin.key?

Maybe it's the OS? I'm still using Mojave, maybe Catalina introduced some amazing efficiencies? Or maybe it's the hardware, or the hardware under the VM? Maybe the VM somehow puts all that stuff in the filesystem into memory when it starts up, where actually grabbing the data from a drive in a native OS needs more resources? Maybe you have a newer version of NI? (I've got v2.1-20180531... but then again I think you once said newer versions would not differ in how they initialize.)

All I know is, I have the exact same modded EET game duplicated on my computer - one version has 100K override files from installed mods (5GB of data), and the other has the same installed mods but is biffed. I put the same version of NI into each game folder: with biffed files NI opens in three seconds, without biffing it takes 10 minutes. There is some kind of major difference there.

Edited September 6, 2022 by subtledoctor

[argent77]

11 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Maybe you have a newer version of NI? (I've got v2.1-20180531...

That's it! You are using a version with a vastly inferior file caching mechanism (coincidentally that was the last version with slow loading times). I strongly recommend to update NI.

Edited September 6, 2022 by argent77

[subtledoctor]

7 minutes ago, argent77 said:

That's it! You are using a version with a vastly inferior file caching mechanism (coincidentally that was the last version with slow loading times). I strongly recommend to update NI.

I'll look into it. I haven't  updated in a while. Are the MacOS builds still being kept up-to-date? it might be something like, I tried updating and the new version had trouble remembering my preferences? I'll try updating and report back.

[argent77]

2 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Are the MacOS builds still being kept up-to-date?

Yes, they are now included in the official releases as well.

 

2 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

it might be something like, I tried updating and the new version had trouble remembering my preferences?

I think I experienced that as well in my tests. (Iirc) it happened when I closed NI by the "Quit" option in the "Near Infinity" menu instead of the "Game" menu.

Edited September 6, 2022 by argent77

[argent77]

On 9/7/2022 at 12:42 AM, argent77 said:

On 9/7/2022 at 12:40 AM, subtledoctor said:

it might be something like, I tried updating and the new version had trouble remembering my preferences?

I think I experienced that as well in my tests. (Iirc) it happened when I closed NI by the "Quit" option in the "Near Infinity" menu instead of the "Game" menu.

@subtledoctor There is an improved macOS package for NI available as proper app installer (pkg and dmg archives): https://github.com/AstroBryGuy/NearInfinity-OSX/releases

It installs NI with the right permissions, so that more recent macOS versions should have no trouble accessing the home folder of EE games.

I'll see if I can fix the settings-not-saved issue when the app is closed from the app's system menu (or via ⌘ + Q shortcut).

[Guest TinekeFrineke]

Hi I am playing Planescape Torment EE but I have a problem: as soon as I exit Ravel's maze, I have a "Spell Failure" status. I reverted to a much older savegame but the same problem. I tried removing it through NearInfinity but that won't work. I remove it in the edit / effect section of the nameless one, did I do something wrong? The entry looks like this:

Type: Casting failure (60)
Target: Preset target (2)
Power: 0
Amount: 100
Failure type: Wizard (0)
Timing mode: Absolute duration - 4096
Duration: 5903986
Probability 1: 100
Probability 2: 0

Is there anything else I can try?