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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#101

Post by immibis »

crest wrote: post #38
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

How is there so much duplication?

The idea is to duplicate assets so loading a "level" is just sequential reading from the file system. It's required on optical media and can be very useful on spinning disks too. On SSDs it's insane. The logic should've been the other way around. Do a speed test on start an offer to "optimise for spinning media" if the performance metrics look like it would help. If the game was ~20GB instead of ~150GB almost no play…

This idea of one continuous block per level dates back to the PS1 days.

Hard drives are much, much faster than optical media - on the order of 80 seeks per second and 300 MB/s sequential versus, like, 4 seeks per second and 60 MB/s sequential (for DVD-ROM).

You still want to load sequential blocks as much as possible, but you can afford to have a few. (Assuming a traditional engine design, no megatextures etc) you probably want to load each texture from a separate file, but you can certainly afford to load a block of grass textures, a block of snow textures, etc. Also throughput is 1000x higher than a PS1 (300 kB/s) so you can presumably afford to skip parts of your sequential runs.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#102

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

chrisweekly wrote: post #88
fullstop wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

For today's 10,000: https://www.righto.com/2025/01/its-time-to-abandon-cargo-cul...

> The pop-culture cargo cult description, however, takes features of some cargo cults (the occasional runway) and combines this with movie scenes to yield an inaccurate and fictionalized dscription. It may be hard to believe that the description of cargo cults that you see on the internet is mostly wrong, but in the remainder of this article, I will explain this in detail.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#103

Post by everdrive »

embedding-shape wrote: post #100
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…

This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid…

>but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.

More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit, but that's mostly due to my experience regarding their attempts to stuff a PSN ID requirement into HD2 as well as their general handling of their IPs. (Horizon Zero Dawn is not only terrible, but they seem to try to force interest with a new remake on a monthly basis.)

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#104

Post by maccard »

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.

I've worked in games for close to 15 years, and every studio I've worked on we've played the game very regularly. My current team every person plays the game at least once a week, and more often as we get closer to builds.

In my last project, the gameplay team played every single day.

> 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

How would playing on middle of the road hardware have caught this? The fix to this was to benchmark the load time on the absolute bottom end of hardware, with and without the duplicated logic. Which you'd only do once you have a suspicion that it's going to be faster if you change it...

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#105

Post by _aavaa_ »

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.

But they did NOT know it would lead to multi-minute load time. They did not measure a baseline.

Instead they did blindly did extra work and 6x’ed the storage requirement.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#106

Post by renewiltord »

Pretty cool. I think it’s completely normal to be under a crunch and just go with some standard practices under normal conditions. Cool that they went back and sorted it out afterwards!

I’ve got to say. I do find it somewhat unusual that despite the fact that every HN engineer has John Carmack level focus on craftsmanship, about 1/100k here produce that kind of outcome.

I don’t get it. All of you guys are good at pointing out how to do good engineering. Why don’t you make good things?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#107

Post by maccard »

BizarroLand wrote: post #16
tetris11 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.

The read speed off of an 8xDVD is ~10MB/s. The cheapest 500GB SSD on Amazon has a read speed of of 500MB/s. An NVMe drive has is 2500MB/s. We can read an entire DVD's capacity (4.7GB) from an SSD in under 10 seconds, compared to 8 minutes.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#108

Post by embedding-shape »

everdrive wrote: post #103
embedding-shape wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid…

>but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something. More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involveme…

> More or less nothing is optimized these days

Not true, lots of games are optimized, but it's one of those tasks that almost no one notices when you do it great, but everyone notices when it's missing, so it's really hard to tell by just consuming ("playing") games.

> I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit

I'm not, SIE have amazing engineers, probably the best in the industry, and if you have access to those kind of resources, you use it. Meanwhile, I agree that executives at Sony sometimes have no clue, but that doesn't mean SIE helping you with development suddenly has a negative impact on you.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#109

Post by mort96 »

The negativity towards this is wild. A company followed relatively widely accepted industry practice (lots and lots of other games also have huge sizes on disk for the exact same reason), then eventually they decided to do their own independent testing to check whether said common practice actually makes things better or not in their case, found that it didn't, so they reversed it. In addition, they wrote up some nice technical articles on the topic, helping to change the old accepted industry wisdom.

This seems great to me. Am I crazy? This feels like it should be Hacker News's bread and butter, articles about "we moved away from Kubernetes/microservices/node.js/serverless/React because we did our own investigation and found that the upsides aren't worth the downsides" tend to do really well here. How is this received so differently?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#110

Post by jamesgeck0 »

finalarbiter wrote: post #98
darthcircuit wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but magicka is a pretty fun game. You cast spells in a similar way as calling in strategems in hd2. The spell system was super neat. There’s several different elements (fire, air, water, earth, electricity, ice, ands maybe something else. It’s been a while since I played). Each element can be used on its own or is combinable. Different combinations would cast different spells. Fire+water makes steam for insta…

> maybe something else Water, Life, Arcane, Shield, Lightning, Cold, Fire, and Earth. [0] It's worth noting that, though you can combine most of the elements to form new spells (and with compounding effects, for example wetting or steaming an enemy enhances lightning damage), you cannot typically combine opposites like lightning/ground, which will instead cancel out. Killed myself many times trying to cast lightning…

This is the most Helldivers 2 part for me. Spells being intentionally tricky to execute, combined with accidental element interactions and "friendly fire."
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