Do HDDs make up that much of the gaming market segment?
Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
191–200 of 317 posts
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#192too many arm chair game devs who think they know better in this thread
I think what irks people is the number one rule of optimization is to always measure
You never assume something is an optimization or needed and never do hypothetical optimizations
I can see why it would happen in this case though, gamedev is chaotic and you're often really pressed for time
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#193The 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…
It was a choice, not an oversight. They actively optimised for HDD users, because they believed that failing to do so could impact load times for both SSD and HDD users. There was no speed penalty in doing so for SSD users, just a disk usage penalty.
Helldivers II was also much smaller at launch than it is now. It was almost certainly a good choice at launch.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#194Earlier 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…
It was a choice, not an oversight. They actively optimised for HDD users, because they believed that failing to do so could impact load times for both SSD and HDD users. There was no speed penalty in doing so for SSD users, just a disk usage penalty. Helldivers II was also much smaller at launch than it is now. It was almost certainly a good choice at launch.
You make a million decisions in the beginning of every project. I'm certain they made the choice to do this "optimization" at an early point (or even incidentally copied the choice over from an earlier project) at a stage where the disk footprint was small (a game being 7GB when it could've been 1GB doesn't exactly set off alarm bells).
Then they just didn't reconsider the choice until, well, now.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ga…
> Given that, people need to accept higher costs, longer development times, or reduced scope if they want better optimized games.
God why can’t it just be longer development time. I’m sick of the premature fetuses of games.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#196Earlier 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.
Not sure GTA 5 is the right example to list here. Remember https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times.... At least for a while they didn't optimize at all.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#197Earlier 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…
> > - 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.
I specifically mean the exact time, right after the pelican starts to fly. I keep seeing " left" or "disconnected". Some come back and I have a habit of asking: "Crash?", they respond with "yeah"
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#198The 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…
My immediate question is that if all of that was on-disk data duplication, why did it affected download size? Can't small download be expanded into optimal layout on the client side?
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#199Earlier 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…
But this isn't an optimization. The 150+GB size is the "optimization", one that never actually helped with anything. The whole news here is "Helldivers 2 stopped intentionally screwing its customers".
I don't see why it's a surprise that people react "negatively", in the sense of being mad that (a) Helldivers 2 was intentionally screwing the customers before, and (b) everyone else is still doing it.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#200I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…
A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.
Is that a negative? All of the "negative" things listed make me think that they are really cool and trying to learn stuff and challenge things.