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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

#121

Post by jjk166 »

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…

I'd bet any amount of money a demo ran slow on one stakeholder's computer, who happened to have a mechanical hard drive, they attributed the slowness to the hard drive without a real investigation and optimizing for mechanical hard drive performance became standard practice. The demo may not have even been for this game, just a case of once bitten twice shy.

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

#122

Post by jeroenhd »

account42 wrote: post #112
jeroenhd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear rea…

They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...

> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.

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

#123

Post by Narishma »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #71
root_axis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimizing for disk space is very low on the priority list for pretty much every game, and this makes sense since its very low on the list of customer concerns relative to things like in-game performance, net code, tweaking game mechanics and balancing etc.

Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good. I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some gam…

That used to be the case, but this current generation the vast majority of games have a 60 fps performance mode. On PS5 at least, I can't speak about other consoles.

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

vardump wrote: post #87
robin_reala wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.

Rather 89% PC players have an SSD. For the console players much less. People (read: hordes of kids) are still using PS3, PS4, etc.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by horsawlarway »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #116
afavour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

Which goes to show, that they don't care about the user, but only about the user's money.

No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense.

Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important".

If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size, or more content - the vast majority would vote content.

If anything, I'd wager this decision was still driven by internal goals for the company, because producing a 154gb artifact and storing it for things like CI/CD are still quite expensive if you have a decent number of builds/engineers. Both in time and money.

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

#126

Post by Tostino »

weavejester wrote: post #111
afavour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.

That is a feature for franchise games like CoD.

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

#128

Post by jeroenhd »

afavour wrote: post #101
jeroenhd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

> If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in. And others who wish one single game didn't waste 130GB of their disk space, it's fine to ignore their opinions? They used up a ton more disk space to apply an ill-advised optimization that didn't have much effect. I don't really understand why you'd consider that a positive thing…

By their own industry data (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin.

The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that they were simply too lazy to ever run fdupes over their install directory, which is simply not the case. The duplication was intentional, and is still intentional in many other games that could but likely won't apply the same data minimization.

I'll gladly take this update because considerable effort was spent on measuring the impact, but not one of those "everyone around me is so lazy, I'll just be the noble hero to sacrifice my time to deduplicate the game files" updates.

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

#129

Post by Karliss »

everforward wrote: post #82
eska wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 util…

The game installer can't control the layout on an HDD without doing some very questionable things like defragging and moving existing user files around the disk. It probably _could_ but the risk of irrecoverable user data loss or accidentally corrupting a boot partition via a bug would make it completely not worth it. Even if you pack those, there's no guarantee they don't get fragmented by the filesystem. CDs are di…

It's less about ensuring perfect layout as it is about avoiding almost guaranteed terrible layout. Unless your filesystem is fully fragmented already it won't intentionally shuffle and split big files without a good reason.

Single large file is still more likely to be mostly sequential compared to 10000 tiny files. With large amount of individual files the file system is more likely to opportunistically use the small files for filling previously left holes. Individual files more or less guarantee that you will have to do multiple syscalls per each file and to open and read it, also potentially more amount of indirection and jumping around on the OS side to read the metadata of each individual file. Individual files also increases chance of accidentally introducing random seeks due to mismatch between the order updater writes files, the way file system orders things and the order in which level description files list and reads files.

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

#130

Post by ajsnigrutin »

horsawlarway wrote: post #125
zelphirkalt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which goes to show, that they don't care about the user, but only about the user's money.

No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense. Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important". If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size,…

154GB is A LOT still.

I mean.. A few years ago, 1TB SSDs were still the best buy and many people haven't ugpraded still, and wasthing 15% of your total storage on just one game is still a pain for many.

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