The save game feature seems simple but it’s mind-blowing how it can return the exact state of a game with all elements/events organised in the correct order. Can anyone explain how it works?
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Games live in the random-access memory of your computer. Every bit of information required to create any specific game state is stored there. The simplest way to save would be to just copy all of this data to the hard drive so it can just be moved back and resumed later. But this would take like eight gigabytes of hard drive space for each save, so you need to optimize the save format for space. This means discarding any information that is not relevant for tracking your progression- like art assets, which stay more or less the same, loaded areas, all that stuff that is made to be easily recoverable from the game data, so you don’t need to copy it into the save. The only thing you really need to save is player data- what you’re carrying, where you are, what quests you’ve completed. And that can be made very compact.
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