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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#201

Post by recursive »

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…

I remember seeing warez game releases in the late 90s that had custom packaging to de-compress sound effects that were stored uncompressed in the original installer.

It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#202

Post by Cyphusx »

kappaking wrote: post #195
mywittyname wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trade off they're talking about is to arrive at the same end product.

The reason games are typically released as "fetuses" is because it reduces the financial risk. Much like any product, you want to get it to market as soon as is sensible in order to see if it's worth continuing to spend time and money on it.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#203

Post by ahartmetz »

nopurpose wrote: post #198
zamadatix wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure it can - it would need either special pre- and postprocessing or lrzip ("long range zip") to do it automatically. lrzip should be better known, it often finds significant redundancy in huge archives like VM images.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#204

Post by maccard »

seg_lol wrote: post #177
maccard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would that help them diagnose a code path that wasn't ever being run (loading non duplicated assets on HDDs)?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#205

Post by maccard »

creshal wrote: post #143
maccard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with consoles, and only affects PC builds of the game

HD2 started as playstation exclusive, and was retargeted mid-development for simultaneous release. So the PS5's SSD architecture was what developers were familiar with when they tried to figure out what changes would be needed to make the game work on PC.

I don't really understand your point. You're making a very definitive statement about how the PS5's SSD architecture is responsible for this issue - when the isssue is on a totally different platform, where they have _already_ attempted (poorly, granted) to handle the different architectures.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#206

Post by Arrath »

wongarsu wrote: post #52
_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

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

I had assumed the practice started to die off when installing games became dominant over streaming from the disc even on consoles. Seems I was wrong!

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#207

Post by Krasnol »

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…

I feel like negativity has become Hacker News's bread and butter.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#208

Post by consp »

abtinf wrote: post #163
zamadatix wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can any games these days be reliably ran on hdd's with max 200mb/s throughout (at best)? Or does everyone get a coffee and some cookies when a new zone loads? Even with this reduction that will take a while.

I thought all required ssd's now for "normal" gameplay.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#209

Post by maccard »

kappaking wrote: post #195
mywittyname wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> God why can’t it just be longer development time.

Where do you stop? What do the 5 tech designers do while the 2 engine programmers optimise every last byte of network traffic?

> I’m sick of the premature fetuses of games.

Come on, keep this sort of crap off here. Games being janky isn't new - look at old console games and they're basically duct taped together. Go back to Half-life 1 in 1998 - the Xen world is complete and utter trash. Go back farther and you have stuff that's literally unplayable [0], or things that were so bad they literally destroyed an entire industry [1], or rendered the game uncompleteable [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde_(video... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/30/a-golden-shinin... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/hv63ad/comm...

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#210

Post by maccard »

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…

> They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.

This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.

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