Connection interrupted during single player campaign

[AdamR]

Product: Command & Conquer Remastered
Platform:PC
Summarize your bug During a single player campaign game I had a "connection interrupted" screen.
How often does the bug occur? Rarely (0% - 9%)
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Ramp up your disk I/O so it's maxed out then perform a quick save.
What happens when the bug occurs? If the game cannot be quick saved in a short enough time due to intense disk I/O it'll think you've timed out.
What do you expect to see? Not this. Its irrelevant for single player.

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During NOD mission 13 I attempted to quick save. The game froze up for a short while, and eventually showed the "connection interrupted" screen as if this were a networked multiplayer game with a connection problem. The timer reached zero but likely under-flowed to a floating point limit. (I was not booted out of the game.)

Screenshot

Also during this time the game behind this screen appeared to run as normal. -- I could see most of what was going on, and hear all of it. (Units being built etc.) I just couldn't interact with the game at all.

The cause will have almost certainly be because my computer was running a scheduled Windows backup at the time, the system image type. This creates high CPU and IO.

[Nyerguds]

@AdamR 

This actually means the game froze. An actual crash is handled by the crash handling mechanism, but if it freezes, the UI just detects that no response is coming from the game engine.

[AdamR]

Yep, I see that it's a freeze and not a crash, though when the disk I/O settles down the engine/UI doesn't resume.

[Nyerguds]

@AdamR 

Oof. I see. This is most likely due to the game saving a screenshot of the whole screen with every savegame. This probably also means that playing in a higher resolutions takes more time and space for the savegames since the saved preview is probably also larger.

I've reported this odd disk space usage issue internally already; it makes no sense for a huge image to be saved for a tiny thumbnail in the UI. Not to mention, it overloads the available cloud sync space when quick saving often.

[AdamR]

That would explain why auto-saving takes a noticeable delay. (It tends to be pretty seamless in most games.)

I'm playing at 1440p, that'd be considerably big to PNG. Particularly in a game like this with FREQUENT auto-saves.

Thanks for mentioning it upstream.

[AdamR]

I've noticed this also appears when you accumulate a large number of saves. -- This briefly pops up when clicking "Load".

[Nyerguds]

@AdamR 

Yea, just... make sure to regularly clean out older savegames, I guess :-\

[AdamR]

In that case it would be a good feature to be able to tick multiple saves and delete them as a batch. Deleting them individually takes a long time, and deleting them from your local disk manually does nothing as Steam Cloud will bring them all back.