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Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

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Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#21

Post by Ekaros »

jsheard wrote: post #19
snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.

Also the cost is often offloaded to the "greedy" Valve... So there is less pressure to optimize their own CDN use.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#22

Post by code_for_monkey »

jsheard wrote: post #19
snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.

I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#23

Post by eska »

rincebrain wrote: post #7

I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here. Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around... The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by has…

HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.

Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully utilize HDD pages (some small config file won’t fill 4kb filesystem pages or even the smaller disk sectors). All the data of one stage will be read into disk cache in one fell swoop as well.

On optical media like CDs one would even put some data closer to the middle or on the outer edge of the disc because the reading speed is different due to the linear velocity.

This is an optimization for bandwidth at the cost of size (which often wasn’t a problem because the medium wasn’t filled anyway)

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#24

Post by filleduchaos »

throw0101c wrote: post #13
rwmj wrote: post #4

23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!

Back in the day: > 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […] * https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/Return_to_Castle_Wol... * ht…

I for one simply cannot believe that a game with 4K+ textures and high poly count models is bigger than a game that uses billboard sprites which aren't even HD. Whatever could be the reason? A complete mystery...

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#25

Post by snet0 »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #22
jsheard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.

I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs

I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#26

Post by nerdjon »

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want.

Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales.

Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already.

That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower.

I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#27

Post by KeplerBoy »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #22
jsheard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.

I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs

Having a humongous game might be a competitive advantage in the era of live-service games.

Users might be more hesitant to switch to another game if it means uninstalling yours and reinstalling is a big pain in the backside due to long download times.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#28

Post by fleabitdev »

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher.

In other words, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.

Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#30

Post by aeve890 »

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

>It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

You should look at COD install sizes and almost weekly ridiculously huge "updates". 150gb for a first install is almost generous considering most AAA games.

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