Strange folder references in savegame data (SOLVED)

[GarageGothic]

This is not a bug report as much as something I'm quite curious about. I was playing Duty & Beyond, and discovered afterwards that my savegames were huge (around 3-3.5MB each) considering that I didn't recall seeing any use of dynamic sprites or large arrays. So I decided to look at the files in a text editor. What I came across was several entries of this format:

jre1.5.0_04\lib\ext\QTJava.zip CLIENTNAME=Console CommonProgramFiles=C:\Programmer\Fælles filer COMPUTERNAME=ZNOTE42

nd;C:\Programmer\QuickTime\QTSystem\;;C:\PROGRA~1\FLLESF~1\MUVEET~1\030625 PATHE

àèL àèL xŠ’^
er\Adobe\AGL;C:\Programmer\VDMSound;C:\Programmer\QuickTime\QTSystem\;;C:\PROGR

Seemingly folders that should have nothing to do with the interior workings of AGS. I then started checking my other savegames for games like 1213, 6 Days a Sacrifice and Access Demo, as well as my own game. AGS Version numbers were 2.62.772, 2.70.864, 2.72.920. Same results.
My first thought was that it was some kind of memory leak, but seeing as they refer to QuickTime,  maybe it has to do with the sound or movie playback or other external libraries accessed by AGS. But why refer to the Java folder then? Anybody got a better explanation?

[Scorpiorus]

Yeah, I noticed it too. I'm not sure, but maybe it's a side effect of some kind of memory dump AGS does when saving the game.

I wonder, would AGS savegames load up normally when copied to another PC?

[Kweepa]

Malloc doesn't zero out the memory it allocates, so if AGS allocates some memory but doesn't fill it up then there could be garbage from other programs in there.
That's what this looks like.
I'm not sure why the save game is so big - then again Duty and Beyond is a huge game.

[Scorpiorus]

Ah yeah, it might be that; savegames should then load up no problem on a PC different to the one they were saved on.

As for savegame size, since the engine seems to dump blocks of memory (eg: for in-script defined data, I believe), the resulting savegame file would tend to become rather large in size, it may possible become even larger as you progress through the game and more room data needs to be saved, as I understand.

That may seem as an overkill, but practically HDD space is not a problem these days, and saves then tend to compress very good anyway, should the need arise. It's also technically appealing to implement

[GarageGothic]

I think you're right. The 3.5MB Savegame compresses to 33KB by the way, so I think there's not much actual data.

[Pumaman]

Malloc doesn't zero out the memory it allocates, so if AGS allocates some memory but doesn't fill it up then there could be garbage from other programs in there.
That's what this looks like.

Precisely. Don't worry, AGS isn't scanning through your system and taking notes on what programs you have installed

[GarageGothic]

Thanks for clearing that up, CJ.