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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#141

Post by embedding-shape »

everdrive wrote: post #114
embedding-shape wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

BF6 comes to mind, out of newly released games. Arc Raiders too, seems to have avoided the heap of criticism because of performance, meaning it is probably optimized enough so people don't notice issues. Dyson Sphere Program (yet to be released) is a bit older, and indie, but very well optimized.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#143

Post by creshal »

maccard wrote: post #55
creshal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Industry hearsay" in this case was probably Sony telling game devs how awesome the PS5's custom SSD was gonna be, and nobody bothered to check their claims.

What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with consoles, and only affects PC builds of the game

HD2 started as playstation exclusive, and was retargeted mid-development for simultaneous release.

So the PS5's SSD architecture was what developers were familiar with when they tried to figure out what changes would be needed to make the game work on PC.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#144

Post by eurekin »

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…

The negativity wasn't created in a vacuum. ArrowHead has a long track record of technical mishaps and a proven history of erasing all evidence about those issues, without ever trying to acknowledge them. Reddits, Discord and YouTube comment section are heavily moderated. I suspect there's might be a 3rd party involved in this, which doesn't forward any technical issues, if the complaint involves any sign of frustration. Even the relation with their so called "Propaganda Commanders" (official moniker for their youtube partner channels) has been significantly strained in two cases, for trivialities.

It took Sony's intervention to actually pull back the game into playable state once - resulting in the so called 60 day patch.

Somehow random modders were able to fix some of the most egregiously ignored issues (like an enemy type making no sound) quickly and effectively. ArrowHead ignored, then denied, then used the "gamers bad" tactic, banned people pointing it out. After long time, finally fixing it and trying to bury it in the patch notes too.

They also have been caught straight up lying about changes, most recent one was: "Apparently we didn't touch the Coyote", where they simply buffed enemies resistance to fire, effectively nerfing the gun.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#145

Post by everdrive »

embedding-shape wrote: post #141
everdrive wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

BF6 comes to mind, out of newly released games. Arc Raiders too, seems to have avoided the heap of criticism because of performance, meaning it is probably optimized enough so people don't notice issues. Dyson Sphere Program (yet to be released) is a bit older, and indie, but very well optimized.

Thanks for the list -- now that you mention it, I recall being quite surprised to learn that Arc Raiders was not only an UE5 game but would also run nicely on my PC. (I haven't played it, but a friend asked me to consider it) Now that you mention it as well, I think I recall the BF6 folks talking specifically about not cramming too many graphical techniques into their games so that people could actually play the game.

Thanks for the list!

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#146

Post by embedding-shape »

everdrive wrote: post #145
embedding-shape wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BF6 comes to mind, out of newly released games. Arc Raiders too, seems to have avoided the heap of criticism because of performance, meaning it is probably optimized enough so people don't notice issues. Dyson Sphere Program (yet to be released) is a bit older, and indie, but very well optimized.

Thanks for the list -- now that you mention it, I recall being quite surprised to learn that Arc Raiders was not only an UE5 game but would also run nicely on my PC. (I haven't played it, but a friend asked me to consider it) Now that you mention it as well, I think I recall the BF6 folks talking specifically about not cramming too many graphical techniques into their games so that people could actually play the game…

> I recall being quite surprised to learn that Arc Raiders was not only an UE5 game but would also run nicely on my PC

Yeah, Unreal Engine (5 almost specifically) is another example of things that are unoptimized by default, very easy to notice, but once you work on it, it becomes invisible and it's not that people suddenly cheer, you just don't hear complaints about it.

It's also one of those platforms where there is a ton of help available from Epic if you really want it, so you can tune the defaults BEFORE you launch your game, but hardly anyone seemingly does that, and then both developers and users blame the engine, instead of blaming the people releasing the game. It's a weird affair all around :)

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#147

Post by sigmoid10 »

eurekin wrote: post #144
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…

The negativity wasn't created in a vacuum. ArrowHead has a long track record of technical mishaps and a proven history of erasing all evidence about those issues, without ever trying to acknowledge them. Reddits, Discord and YouTube comment section are heavily moderated. I suspect there's might be a 3rd party involved in this, which doesn't forward any technical issues, if the complaint involves any sign of frustrati…

Sony nearly killed all good will the game had accrued when they tried to use the massive player base as an opportunity to force people into their worthless ecosystem. I don't think Sony even has the capability to make good technical decisions here, they are just the publisher. It was always Arrowhead trying to keep up with their massive success that they clearly weren't prepared for at all. In the beginning they simply listened to some very vocal players' complaints, which turned out to not be what the majority actually wanted. Player driven development is hardly ever good for a game.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#148

Post by jeffwask »

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…

For me it's not so much about shitting on game devs as it is about shitting on the ogres that run game companies. Any of us who have done development should understand we have little control over scope and often want to do more than the business allows us to.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#149

Post by jauntywundrkind »

mschuster91 wrote: post #129
MattGaiser wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron." The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung. Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all featur…

Or these devs & users can migrate to a PWA. Which will have vastly less overhead. Because it is shared, because each of those 10 apps you mention would be (or could be, if they have ok data architecture) tiny.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#150

Post by saratogacx »

mschuster91 wrote: post #129
MattGaiser wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron." The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung. Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all featur…

Removing layers is hard though, better to have electron host a WASM application which will become a new "native" that gets argued semantically.
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