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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#71

Post by Forgeties79 »

Pannoniae wrote: post #61
_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

The good old "studios don't play their own games" strikes again :P Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware. That will quickly teach them the value of fixing stuff like this and optimising the game in general.

They could have been lying I guess but I listened to a great podcast about the development of Helldivers 2 (I think it was gamemakers notebook) and one thing that was constantly brought up was as they iterated they forced a huge chunk of the team to sit down and play it. That’s how things like diving from a little bit too high ended up with you faceplanting and rag-dolling, tripping when jet packing over a boulder that you get a little too close to, etc. They found that making it comically realistic in some areas led to more unexpected/emergent gameplay that was way more entertaining. Turrets and such not caring if you’re in the line of fire was brought up I believe.

That’s how we wound up with this game where your friends are as much of a liability as your enemies.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#72

Post by Normal_gaussian »

rjzzleep wrote: post #64
Hendrikto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our worst case projections did not come to pass. 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 unknown…

On the flip side I don't remember who did it, but basically extracting textures on disk fixed all the performance issues UE5 has on some benchmarks(sorry for being vague, but I can't find the source material right now). But their assumption is in fact a sound one.

Yes. Its quite common for games to have mods that repack textures or significantly tweak the UE5 config at the moment - and its very common to see users using it when it doesn't actually affect their use cases.

As an aside, I do enjoy the modding community naming over multiple iterations of mods - "better loading" -> "better better loading" -> "best loading" -> "simplified loading" -> "x's simplified loading" -> "y's simplified loading" -> "z's better simplified loading". Where 'better' is often some undisclosed metric based on some untested assumptions.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#73

Post by justsomehnguy »

Hikikomori wrote: post #41
_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.

So they premature optimized for a wrong case.

> multi minute load times

23Gb / 100mb / 60s = 3.92m

So in the worst case when everything is loaded at once (how on a system with Considering GTA whatever version could sit for 15 minutes at the loading screen because nobody bothered to check why - the industry could really say not to bother.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#74

Post by chamomeal »

everdrive wrote: post #59

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…

The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game.

When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.

Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#75

Post by justsomehnguy »

viraptor wrote: post #24
dontlaugh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not at all. But by putting every asset a level (for example) needs in the same file, you can pretty much guarantee you can read it all sequentially without additional seeks. That does force you to duplicate some assets a lot. It's also more important the slower your seeks are. This technique is perfect for disc media, since it has a fixed physical size (so wasting space on it is irrelevant) and slow seeks.

> by putting every asset a level (for example) needs in the same file, you can pretty much guarantee you can read it all sequentially I'd love to see it analysed. Specifically, the average number of nonseq jumps vs overall size of the level. I'm sure you could avoid jumps within megabytes. But if someone ever got closer to filling up the disk in the past, the chances of contiguous gigabytes are much lower. This paper…

> But if someone ever got closer to filling up the disk in the past, the chances of contiguous gigabytes are much lower

Someone installing a 150GB game sure do have 150GB+ of free space and there would be a lot of continuous free space.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#76

Post by crote »

tetris11 wrote: post #12
wvbdmp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.

In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger. That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

> That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!

Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#77

Post by whizzter »

_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

It's an valid issue, those of us who worked back in the day on GD/DVD,etc games really ran into bad loading walls if we didn't duplicate data for straight streaming.

Data-sizes has continued to grow and HDD-seek times haven't gotten better due to physics (even if streaming probably has kept up), the assumption isn't too bad considering history.

It's a good that they actually revisited it _when they had time_ because launching a game, especially a multiplayer one, will run into a lot of breaking bugs and this (while a big one, pun intended) is still by most classifications a lower priority issue.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#78

Post by whalesalad »

chamomeal wrote: post #74
everdrive wrote: post #59

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…

The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game. When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp. Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and r…

It's such a janky game. Definitely feels like it was built using the wrong tool for the job. Movement will get stuck on the most basic things. Climbing and moving over obstacles is always a yucky feeling.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#79

Post by fullstop »

Hendrikto wrote: post #58
_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

> our worst case projections did not come to pass. 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 unknown…

It's like the story of a young couple cooking their first Christmas ham.

The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this.

"I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it."

So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too.

The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end off of the ham before cooking it?"

The grandma laughs and says "I cut it off because my pan was too small!"

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