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

111–120 of 317 posts

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#111

Post by shadowgovt »

123malware321 wrote: post #97
FieryMechanic wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine.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 r…

considering it still cost 40$ for a 2 year old game, i think they are way beyond the excuse of small team low budget trying to make cool stuff. They have receive shit tons of money and are way to late trying to optimise the game. When it came out it ran so pisspoor i shelved it for a long time. Trying it recently its only marginally better. its really poorly optimised, and blaming old tech is nonsense. People make mu…

It costs $40 for a 2-year-old game because the market is bearing $40 for a 2-year-old game.

If anything, it's a testament to how good a job they've done making the game.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#112

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

Sony also published No Man's Sky.

I'm not sure having the support of Sony is that gold-standard imprint that people think it is.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#113

Post by imtringued »

pixl97 wrote: post #89
Xelbair wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 requ…

It's not an issue with asynchronous filesystem IO. Again, async file IO should be the default for game engines. It doesn't take a genius to gather a list of assets to load and then wait for the whole list to finish rather than blocking on every tiny file.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#114

Post by everdrive »

embedding-shape wrote: post #108
everdrive wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 a…

>Not true, lots of games are optimized,

I don't mean this is a counter-argument -- I'm really interested. What are some good examples of very recent optimized games?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#115

Post by scsh »

mort96 wrote: post #109

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 nic…

It's because shitting on game devs is the trendy thing these days, even among more technically inclined crowds unfortunately. It seems like there's a general unwillingness to accept that game development is hard and you can't just wave the magic "optimize" wand at everything when your large project is also a world of edge cases. But it seems like it should be that simple according to all the armchair game devs on the internet.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#116

Post by heftig »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95
heftig wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.

To be clear, walking backwards (away from the target) reduced your bullet velocity relative to the target, reducing the damage you were doing and leading to you needing more shots.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#117

Post by aftbit »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
123malware321 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

considering it still cost 40$ for a 2 year old game, i think they are way beyond the excuse of small team low budget trying to make cool stuff. They have receive shit tons of money and are way to late trying to optimise the game. When it came out it ran so pisspoor i shelved it for a long time. Trying it recently its only marginally better. its really poorly optimised, and blaming old tech is nonsense. People make mu…

It costs $40 for a 2-year-old game because the market is bearing $40 for a 2-year-old game. If anything, it's a testament to how good a job they've done making the game.

The most recent Battlefield released at $80. Arc Raiders released at $40 with a $20 deluxe edition upgrade. I think $40 for a game like Helldivers 2 is totally fair. It's a fun game, worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#118

Post by MattGaiser »

mort96 wrote: post #109

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 nic…

Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron."

Many would consider this a bare minimum rather than something worthy of praise.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#119

Post by aftbit »

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.

It's actually a really nice spell casting system. It lets you have a ton of different spells with only 4 buttons. It rewards memorizing the most useful (like reinforce). It gives a way for things like the squid disruptor fields or whatever they're called to mess with your muscle memory while still allowing spells. It would be way less interesting if it was just using spell slots like so many other games.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#120

Post by jayd16 »

_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

You can't bench your finished game before it exists and you don't really want to rock the boat late in dev, either.

It was a fundamentally sound default that they revisited. Then they blogged about the relatively surprising difference it happen to make in their particular game. As it turns out the loading is CPU bound anyway, so while the setting is doing it's job, in the context of the final game, it happens to not be the bottle neck.

There's also the movement away from HDD and disc drives in the player base to make that the case as well.

Post reply on HN