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

151–160 of 317 posts

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#151

Post by zamadatix »

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…

Each person seems to have their own bugbear about Electron but I really doubt improving Electron to have shared instances a la WebView2 would make the much of a dent in the hate for it here.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#152

Post by pixl97 »

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.

As the other user stated, just look up Crystal Disk Info results for both HDDs and SSD and you'll see hard drives do about 1/3rd of a MBPs on random file IO while the same hard drive will do 400MBps on a contiguous read. For things like this reading a zip and decompressing in memory is "typically" (again, you have to test this) orders of magnitude faster.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#153

Post by zamadatix »

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…

Arrowhead probably deserves more love for breaking the norm but I think it's overshadowed by people finding out for the first time the reason HDDs are so common in gaming setups is companies have been blindly shaving a few seconds off HDD load time off at the cost of 7x the disk space.

If it had been more well known this was the cause of game bloat before then this probably would have been better received. Still, Arrowhead deserves more credit both for testing and breaking the norm as well as making it a popular topic.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#154

Post by eurekin »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #147
eurekin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simp…

So, players wanting:

- To their PC not reboot and BSOD (was a case few months ago)

- Be able to actually finish a mission (game still crashes a lot just after extraction, it's still rare for the full team to survive 3 missions in a row)

- Be able to use weapon customisation (the game crashed, when you navigated to the page with custom paints)

- Continue to run, even when anybody else from the team was stimming (yes, any person in the team stimming caused others to slow down)

- Actually be able to hear one of the biggest enemies in the game

- To not issue stim/reload/weapon change multiple times, for them just to work (it's still normal to press stim 6 times in some cases, before it activates, without any real reason)

- Be able to use chat, when in the vehicle (this would result in using your primary weapon)

- Be able to finish drill type mission (this bugs out a lot still)

- Not be attacked by enemies that faze through buildings

- Not be attacked by bullets passing through terrain, despite the player bullets being stopped there

are just vocal player's complaints? A lot of those bugs went totally unaddressed for months. Some keep coming back in regressions. Some just are still ongoing. This is only a short list of things I came across, while casually playing. It's a rare sight to have a full OP without an issue (even mission hardlocks still).

About Sony - I specifically referred the Shams Jorjani's (CEO of ArrowHead) explanation to Hermen Hulst (the head of PlayStation Studios) why the review score collapsed to 19%, among other issues.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#155

Post by red-iron-pine »

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 engineers disease: "i'm smarter than you and I need to prove it, and we're so smart we wouldn't have shipped this code in the first place" bla bla bla

also keep in mind that modern gaming generates more revenue than the movie industry, so it's in the interests of several different parties to denigrate or undermine any competing achievement -- "Bots Rule Every Thing Around Me"

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#156

Post by pixl97 »

imtringued wrote: post #113
pixl97 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

There are two different things when talking about application behavior versus disk behavior.

>wait for the whole list to finish rather than blocking on every tiny file.

And this is the point. I can make a test that shows exactly what's going on here. Make a random file generator that generates 100,000 4k files. Now, write them on hard drive with other data and things going on at the same time. Now in another run of the program have it generate 100,000 4k files and put them in a zip.

Now, read the set of 100k files from disk and at the same time read the 100k files in a zip....

One finishes in less than a second and one takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on your disk speeds.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#157

Post by red-iron-pine »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #94
heftig wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also think that the tutorial would be tedious if it went through too much of the mechanics. They show you the basics, the rest you pick up through trial and error.

aye. give me the 3 minute tutorial, not the 37 minute tutorial.

i want to play the game, like now, and i'll read the forums after i figure out that i'm missing something imporant

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#158

Post by red-iron-pine »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #93
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 made a decision based on existing data. This isn't unreasonable as you are pretending, especially as PC hardware can be quite diverse. You will be surprised what some people are playing games on. e.g. I know people that still use Windows 7 on a AMD BullDozer rig. Atypical for sure, but not unheard of.

i believe it. hell i'm in F500 companies and virtually all of them had some legacy XP / Server 2000 / ancient Solaris box in there.

old stuff is common, and doubly so for a lot of the world, which ain't rich and ain't rockin new hardware

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#159

Post by somat »

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…

At one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size, They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.

When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.

People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#160

Post by FieryMechanic »

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…

Compared to the bigger gaming studios they are small. In fact they are not that much larger than the company I work for (not a game studio).

The fact it is un-optimised can be forgiven because the game has plenty of other positives so people like myself are willing to look over them.

I've got a few hundred hours in the game (I play for maybe an hour in the evening) and for £35 it was well worth the money.

Post reply on HN