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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#161

Post by debugnik »

aftbit wrote: post #117
shadowgovt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime.

Is that supposed to be praise?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#162

Post by ryandrake »

somat wrote: post #159
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 larg…

> 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.

Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#163

Post by abtinf »

zamadatix wrote: post #153
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, Arr…

Part of what makes this outrageous is that the install size itself is probably a significant part of the reason to install the game on an HDD.

154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.

Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in the first place?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#164

Post by reactordev »

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 comes from the zero effort they put into this prior to launch. Forcing people to download gigs of data that was unnecessary.

Game studio's no longer care how big their games are if steam will still take them. This is a huge problem. GTA5 was notorious for loading json again, and again, and again during loading and it was just a mess. Same for HD2, game engines have the ability to only pack what is used but its still up to the developers to make sure their assets are reusable as to cut down on size.

This is why Star Citizen has been in development for 15 years. They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.

The anger here is real. The anger here is justified. I'm sick of having to download 100gb+ simply because a studio is too lazy and just packed up everything they made into a bundle.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#165

Post by colechristensen »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #131
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 te…

>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?

Have you never worked in an organization that made software?

Damn near everything can be 10x as fast and using 1/10th the resources if someone bothered to take the time to find the optimizations. RARE is it that something is even in the same order of magnitude as its optimum implementation.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#166

Post by entropie »

debugnik wrote: post #161
aftbit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime. Is that supposed to be praise?

Its also wrong. With 10 hours of helldivers 2 you havent seen much of the game at all.

I played it a bit after release and have 230 hours. I liked the game and it was worth my money.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#167

Post by bluedino »

reactordev wrote: post #164
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 comes from the zero effort they put into this prior to launch. Forcing people to download gigs of data that was unnecessary. Game studio's no longer care how big their games are if steam will still take them. This is a huge problem. GTA5 was notorious for loading json again, and again, and again during loading and it was just a mess. Same for HD2, game engines have the ability to only pack what is used…

> They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.

Reminds me of the Crack.com interview with Jonathan Clark:

Adding to the difficulty of the task, our artist had no experience in the field. I remember in a particular level we wanted to have a dungeon. A certain artist begin by creating a single brick, then duplicating it several thousand times and building a wall out of the bricks. He kept complaining that his machine was too slow when he tried to render it. Needless to say this is not the best way to model a brick wall.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160125143707/http://www.loonyg...

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#168

Post by scsh »

jeffwask wrote: post #148
scsh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is completely ok in my opinion. It's just most discourse I come across treats the developers as complete amateurs who don't know what they're doing. As someone who's a professional dev myself I just can't get behind bashing the people doing the actual work when I know we're all dealing with the same business realities, regardless of industry.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#169

Post by Teknoman117 »

jayd16 wrote: post #121
wongarsu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty standard to do that duplication for games on CD/DVD because seek times are so long. It probably just got carried over as the "obviously correct" way of doing things, since HDDs are like DVDs if you squint a bit

The game does ship on disc for console, no?

The current generation of consoles can’t play games directly off the disk. They have to be installed to local storage first.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#170

Post by the_af »

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…

This is not a good invokation of Chesterton's Fence.

The Fence is a parable about understanding something that already exists before asking to remove it. If you cannot explain why it exists, you shouldn't ask to remove it.

In this case, it wasn't something that already existed in their game. It was something that they read, then followed (without truly understanding whether it applied to their game), and upon re-testing some time later, realized it wasn't needed and caused detrimental side-effects. So it's not Chesterton's Fence.

You could argue they followed a videogame industry practice to make a new product, which is reasonable. They just didn't question or test their assumptions that they were within the parameters of said industry practice.

I don't think it's a terrible sin, mind you. We all take shortcuts sometimes.

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