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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#171

Post by ozgrakkurt »

colechristensen wrote: post #165
Night_Thastus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

This is not a reason for accepting it imo

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#172

Post by reactordev »

bluedino wrote: post #167
reactordev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

this is very very common as there's only a handful of school that teach this. Displacement mapping with a single poly is the answer. Game dev focused schools have this but any other visual media school it's "build a brick, array the brick 10,000 times".

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#173

Post by FieryMechanic »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #158
FieryMechanic wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My PC now is 6 years old and I have no intention of upgrading it soon. My laptop is like 8 years old and it is fine for what I use it for. My monitors are like 10-12 years old (they are early 4k monitors) and they are still good enough. I am primarily using Linux now and the machine will probably last me to 2030 if not longer.

Pretending that this is an outrageous decision when the data and the commonly assumed wisdom was that there were still a lot of people using HDDs.

They've since rectified this particular issue and there seems to be more criticism of the company after fixing an issue.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#174

Post by mywittyname »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #171
colechristensen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 som…

This is not a reason for accepting it imo

Optimization takes up time, and often it takes up the time of an expert.

Given that, people need to accept higher costs, longer development times, or reduced scope if they want better optimized games.

But what is worse, is just trying to optimize software is not the same as successfully optimizing it. So time and money spent on optimization might yield no results because there might not be anymore efficiency to be gained, the person doing the work lacks the technical skill, the gains are part of a tradeoff that cannot be justified, or the person doing the work can't make a change (i.e., a 3rd party library is the problem).

The lack of technical skill is a big one, IMO. I'm personally terrible at optimizing code, but I'm pretty good at building functional software in a short amount of time. We have a person on our team who is really good at it and sometimes he'll come in after me to optimize work that I've done. But he'll spend several multiples of the time I took making it work and hammering out edge cases. Sometimes the savings is worth it.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#175

Post by FieryMechanic »

eurekin wrote: post #154
sigmoid10 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

As someone with 700 hours in the game, I've played the game both on Windows and Linux.

A lot of issues are to do with the fact that the game seems to corrupt itself. If I have issues (usually performance related), I do a steam integrity check and I have zero issues afterwards. BTW, I've had to do this on several games now, so this isn't something that is unique to HellDivers. My hardware is good BTW, I check in various utils and the drives are "ok" as far as I can tell.

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

This was hyped up by a few big YouTubers. The BSODs was because their PCs were broken. One literally had a burn mark on their processor (a known issue with some boards/processor combos) and the BSODs went away when they replaced their processor. This tells me that there was something wrong with their PC and any game would have caused a BSOD.

So I am extremely sceptical of any claims of BSODs because of a game. What almost is always the case is that the OS or the hardware is at issue and playing a game will trigger the issue.

If you are experiencing BSODs I would make sure your hardware and OS are actually good, because they are probably not. BTW I haven't a BSOD in Windows for about a decade because I don't buy crap hardware.

> - 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)

False. A few months ago I played it for an entire day and the game was fine. Last week I played it a good portion of Saturday night. I'm in several large HellDivers focused Discord servers and I've not heard a lot of people complaining about it. Maybe 6 months ago or a year ago this was the case, but not now.

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

This happened for like about a week for some people and I personally didn't experience this.

> 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)

I've not experience this. Not heard anyone complain about this and I am in like 4 different HellDivers focus'd discord servers

> Not be attacked by enemies that faze through buildings

This can be annoying, but it happens like once in a while. It isn't the end of the world.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#176

Post by fyrabanks »

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…

There were 20 people working on this game when they started development. Total. I think they expanded to a little over 100. This isn't some huge game studio that has time to do optimization.

GTA5 had well over 1000 people on its team.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#177

Post by seg_lol »

maccard wrote: post #32
_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

I've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed. I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.

Performance profiling should be built into the engine and turned on at all times. Then this telemetry could be streamed into a system that tracks it across all builds, down to a specific scene. It should be possible to click a link on the telemetry server and start the game at that exact point.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#178

Post by everdrive »

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?

It's a comment about cost-to-hourly-entertainment. eg: if in the general sense you're spending $5-$10 per hour of entertainment you're doing at least OK. I understand that a lot of books and video games can far exceed this, but it's just a general metric and a bit of a low bar to clear. (I have a LOT more hours into the game so from my perspective my $40 has paid quite well.)

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#179

Post by seg_lol »

toast0 wrote: post #23
imtringued wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the real explanation. If they gave the filesystem a list of files to fetch in parallel (async file IO), the concept of "seek time" would become almost meaningless. This optimization will make fetching from both HDDs and SSDs faster. They would be going out of their way to make their product worse for no reason.

Solid state drives tend to respond well to parallel reads, so it's not so clear. If you're reading one at a time, sequential access is going to be better though. But for a mechanical drive, you'll get much better throughput on sequential reads than random reads, even with command queuing. I think earlier discussion showed it wasn't very effective in this case and taking 6x the space for a marginal benefit for the sma…

Every storage medium, including ram, benefits from sequential access. But it doesn't have to be super long sequential access, the seek time, or block open time just needs to be short relative to the next block read.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#180

Post by reactordev »

fyrabanks wrote: post #176
reactordev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There were 20 people working on this game when they started development. Total. I think they expanded to a little over 100. This isn't some huge game studio that has time to do optimization. GTA5 had well over 1000 people on its team.

Size of team has no bearing in this argument. Saying they were small so they get a pass at preventing obscene download sizes is like saying “Napster was created by one man, surely he shouldn’t be accountable” but he was.

When making a game, once you have something playable, is to figure out how to package it. This is included in that effort. Determining which assets to compress, package, and ship. Sometimes this is done by the engine. Sometimes this is done by the art director.

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