Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

store.steampowered.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 317 posts

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#41

Post by Hikikomori »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild

They used industry data to make the decision first to avoid potential multi minute load times for 10% or do of their players, hard to test all kinds of pc configurations. Now they have telemetry showing that it doesn't matter because another parallel task takes about as much time anyway.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#42

Post by djmips »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild

A tale as old as time. Making decisions without actually profiling before, during and after implementing.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#43

Post by debugnik »

wongogue wrote: post #22
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key word is "believed". It doesn't sound like they actually benchmarked.

There is nothing to believe. Random 4K reads for HDD is slow.

I assume asset reads nowadays are much heavier than 4 kB though, specially if assets meant to be loaded together are bundled together in one file. So games now should be spending less time seeking relative to their total read size. Combined with HDD caches and parallel reads, this practice of duplicating over 100 GBs across bundles is most likely a cargo-cult by now.

Which makes me think: Has there been any advances in disk scheduling in the last decade?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#45

Post by Xelbair »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild

worse, in their post they basically said:

>we looked at industry standard values and decided to double them just in case.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#46

Post by functionmouse »

Xelbair wrote: post #45
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild

worse, in their post they basically said: >we looked at industry standard values and decided to double them just in case.

Some kind of evil, dark counterpart to Moore's law in the making

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#47

Post by Xelbair »

maccard wrote: post #32
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild

I've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed. I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.

>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. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.

>We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.

they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#48

Post by debugnik »

NullPrefix wrote: post #44
debugnik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helldivers 2 is an always-online game, you won't find it cracked.

such games can only get private servers

Yes, but those are rarely a thing for most live service games. Unless someone is working on a reimplementation of the entire server side, there's no point in offering or downloading pirate copies.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#49

Post by jsheard »

habbekrats wrote: post #8
breve wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard drives and optical discs are the reason they duplicated the data. The duplicated the data to reduce load times.

do they even sell disc of these game?...

They do, but it's irrelevant to performance nowadays since you're required to install all of the disc data to the SSD before you can play. The PS3/360 generation was the last time you could play games directly from a disc (and even then some games had an install process).
Post reply on HN