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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#181

Post by gfaster »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #175
eurekin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vario…

> So I am extremely sceptical of any claims of BSODs because of a game.

Generally speaking, I am too. That is unless there is kernel-level anticheat. In that case I believe it's fair to disregard all other epistemological processes and blame BSODs on the game out of principle

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#182

Post by red-iron-pine »

Xelbair wrote: post #45
_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

worse, in their post they basically said: >we looked at industry standard values and decided to double them just in case.

this is one of the best selling games in history, and is emently popular across the globe.

it had no serious or glaring impact to their bottom line.

thus it was the right call, and if they didn't bother to fix it they'd still be rolling in $$$$

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#183

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#184

Post by red-iron-pine »

high_na_euv wrote: post #50
habbekrats wrote: post #2

it seems wild the state of games and development today... imagine 131GB out of 154GB of data was not needed....

It was needed. Just the trade off wasnt worth it.

it wasn't needed -- need means "must have"

they're a fantastically popular franchise with a ton of money... and did it without the optimizations.

if they never did these optimizations they'd still have a hugely popular, industry leading game

minor tweaks to weapon damage will do more to harm their bottom line compared to any backend optimization

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#185

Post by eurekin »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #175
eurekin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vario…

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

I was just about to replace my gpu (4090 at that!), I had them 3 times a session. I did sink a lot of hours to debug that (replaced cables, switched PSUs between desktops) and just gave up. After few weeks, lo and behold, a patch comes out and it all disappears.

A lot of people just repeat hearsay about the game

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#187

Post by eurekin »

gfaster wrote: post #181
FieryMechanic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vario…

> So I am extremely sceptical of any claims of BSODs because of a game. Generally speaking, I am too. That is unless there is kernel-level anticheat. In that case I believe it's fair to disregard all other epistemological processes and blame BSODs on the game out of principle

I had them and I keep observing this strange tendency to wipe that particular issue out of existence

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#188

Post by zamadatix »

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…

I think what makes this a bit different from the usual "time/value tradeoff" discussion is bloating the size by 6x-7x was the result of unnecessary work in the name of optimization instead of lack of cycles to spend on optimization.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#189

Post by WheatMillington »

reactordev wrote: post #180
fyrabanks wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Amount of resources absolutely has a bearing on how resources can be allocated.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#190

Post by khannn »

jy14898 wrote: post #5
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

How is there so much duplication?

The post stated that it was believed duplication improved loading times on computers with HDDs rather than SSDs

Who cares? I've installed every graphically intensive game on SSDs since the original OCZ Vertex was released.
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