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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#131

Post by Night_Thastus »

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 would be one thing if it was a 20% increase in space usage, or if the whole game was smaller to start with, or if they had actually checked to see how much it assisted HDD users.

But over 6x the size with so little benefit for such a small segment of the players is very frustrating. Why wasn't this caught earlier? Why didn't anyone test? Why didn't anyone weigh the pros and cons?

It's kind of exemplary of HD2's technical state in general - which is a mix of poor performance and bugs. There was a period where almost every other mission became impossible to complete because it was bugged.

The negativity is frustration boiling over from years of a bad technical state for the game.

I do appreciate them making the right choice now though, of course.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#132

Post by taeric »

scsh wrote: post #115
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…

There has long been a trend that "software engineers" and "computer scientists" both have been rather uninterested in learning the strategies that gaming developers use.

Really, the different factions in software development are a fascinating topic to explore. Add embedded to the discussion, and you could probably start fights in ways that flat out don't make sense.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#133

Post by buildbot »

scsh wrote: post #115
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…

The level of work that goes into even “small” games is pretty incredible. When I was a grad student another student was doing their (thesis based, research focused) masters while working at EA on a streetfighter(?) game.

The game programming was actually just as research focused and involved as the actual research. They were trying to figure out how to get the lowest latency and consistency for impact sounds.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#134

Post by gruez »

imtringued wrote: post #125
pixl97 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If they gave the filesystem a list of files to fetch in parallel (async file IO) This does not work if you're doing tons of small IO and you want something fast. Lets say were on a HDD with 200IOPS and we need to read 3000 small files randomly across the hard drive. Well, at minimum this is going to take 15's seconds plus any additional seek time. Now, lets say we zip up those files in a solid archive. You'll read i…

I haven't found any asynchronous IOPS numbers on HDDS anywhere. The internet IOPs are just 1000ms/seek time with a 8ms seek time for moving from the outer to the inner track, which is only really relevant for the synchronous file IO case. For asynchronous IO you can just do inward/outward passes to amortize the seek time over multiple files. While it may not have been obvious, I have taken archiving or bundling of as…

>I haven't found any asynchronous IOPS numbers on HDDS anywhere. The internet IOPs are just 1000ms/seek time with a 8ms seek time for moving from the outer to the inner track, which is only really relevant for the synchronous file IO case.

>For asynchronous IO you can just do inward/outward passes to amortize the seek time over multiple files.

Here's a random blog post that has benchmarks for a 2015 HDD:

https://davemateer.com/2020/04/19/Disk-performance-CrystalDi...

It shows 1.5MB/s for random 4K performance with high queue depth, which works out to just under 400 IOPS. 1 queue depth (so synchronous) performance is around a third.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#135

Post by embedding-shape »

shadowgovt wrote: post #112
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…

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.

No Man's Sky didn't have technical issues at launch though, it ran fine for what is was. The problem with NMS was that people were told it would be a completely different experience compared to what it ended up being (at launch).

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#136

Post by banannaise »

heftig wrote: post #92
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…

The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.

Not only does the bad tutorial have an in-universe justification; the ways in which it is bad are actually significant to the worldbuilding in multiple ways.

The missing information also encourages positive interactions among the community - newer players are expected to be missing lots of key information, so teaching them is a natural and encouraged element of gameplay.

I stopped playing the game awhile ago, but the tutorial always struck me as really clever.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#137

Post by pixl97 »

wcoenen wrote: post #36
viraptor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. By default, Windows automatically defragments filesystems weekly if necessary. It can be configured in the "defragment and optimize drives" dialog.

Not 'full' de-fragmentation, Microsoft labs did a study and after 64MB slabs of contiguous files you don't gain much so they don't care about getting gigabytes fully defragmented.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100529025623/http://blogs.tech...

old article on the process

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#138

Post by embedding-shape »

scsh wrote: post #115
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…

Meh, the same is true for almost every discussion on the internet, everyone is an expert armchair for whatever subject you come across, and when you ask them about their experience it boils down to "I read lots of Wikipedia articles".

I mean I agree with you, that it is trendy and seemingly easy, to shit on other people's work, and at this point it seems to be a challenge people take up upon themselves, to criticise something in the most flowery and graphic way as possible, hoping to score those sweet internet points.

Since maybe 6-7 years I stopped reading reviews and opinions about newly launched games completely, the internet audience (and reviewers) are just so far off base compared to my own perspective and experience that it have become less than useless, it's just noise at this point.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#139

Post by ok_coo »

I'm glad they've been able to do this, looks like a huge improvement for HD2 on PC.

I've been on PS5 since launch and aside from Baldur's Gate 3, it's been the best game this gen IMO.

The negativity I see towards the game (especially on Youtube) is weird. Some of the critiques seem legit but a lot of feels like rage bait, which appears to be a lot of YT videos around gaming lately.

Anyway, a big improvement for a great game. Seems like less of an incentive now to uninstall if you only play now and then.

iO

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#140

Post by embedding-shape »

heftig wrote: post #116
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And to be extra clear, either way, neither options makes me believe it was an intentional design choice.
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