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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#81

Post by jfindper »

rincebrain wrote: post #65
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…

A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.

I never played Magicka, but the reviews seem fine (76% GameRankings, 74/100 Metacritic, 8/10 EuroGamer, etc.)

Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#82

Post by philistine »

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…

You put the nail on the head with the first Pokémon, but Helldivers 2 is an order of magnitude smaller in the amateur-to-success ratio.

Game Freak could not finish the project, so they had to be bailed by Nintendo with an easy-to-program game so the company could get some much needed cash (the Yoshi puzzle game on NES). Then years later, with no end to the game in sight, Game Freak had to stoop to contracting Creatures inc. to finish the game. Since they had no cash, Creatures inc. was paid with a portion of the Pokémon franchise.

Pokémon was a shit show of epic proportions. If it had been an SNES game it would have been canceled and Game Freak would have closed. The low development cost of Game Boy and the long life of the console made Pokémon possible.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#83

Post by dwroberts »

_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 seems plausible to me that this strategy was a holdover from the first game, which shipped for PS4 and XBO

I don’t know about the Xbox, but on PS4 the hard drive was definitely not fast at all

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#84

Post by heftig »

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 logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game.

As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in two shots of a Quasar Cannon or three shots depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing, or not.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#85

Post by whizzter »

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.

People literally play the games they work on all the time, it's more or less what most do.

Pay 2000$ for indie games so studios could grow up without being beholden to shareholders and we could perhaps get that "perfect" QA,etc.

It's a fucking market economy and people aren't making pong level games that can be simply tuned, you really get what you pay for.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#86

Post by speeder »

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…

All other games from the same studio have the same features.

In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#87

Post by heftig »

speeder wrote: post #86
chamomeal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All other games from the same studio have the same features. In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.

The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it.

The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#88

Post by chrisweekly »

fullstop wrote: post #79
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…

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…

Haha, cargo cult strikes again!

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#89

Post by pixl97 »

Xelbair wrote: post #47
maccard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

It was a real issue in the past with hard drives and small media assets. It's still a real issue even with SSDs. HDD/SSD IOPS are still way slower than contiguous reads when you're dealing with a massive amount of files.

At the end of the day it requires testing which requires time at a time you don't have a lot of time.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#90

Post by FieryMechanic »

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…

A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes.

The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others.

The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire rates and stealth is an option in the game. The game has a decent community and people friendly for the most part, it also has the "feature" of being able to be played for about 20-40 minutes and you can just put it down again for a bit and come back.

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