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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#211

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

If what they were familiar with was a good SSD, then they didn't need to do anything. I don't see how anything Sony said about their SSD would have affected things.

Maybe you're saying the hearsay was Sony exaggerating how bad hard drives are? But they didn't really do that, and the devs would already have experience with hard drives.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#213

Post by mghackerlady »

ryandrake wrote: post #162
somat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Maybe that'll start to change since ram is the new gold and who knows what the AI bubble will eat next

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#214

Post by forrestthewoods »

lordnikon001 wrote: post #192
dnrvs wrote: post #80

too 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

WebDevs who have build systems that take ten minutes and download tens of megabytes of JS and have hundreds of milliseconds of lag are sooooooooooooo not allowed to complain about game devs ever.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#215

Post by Dylan16807 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #60
Hikikomori wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used industry data to make the decision first to avoid potential multi minute load times for 10% or do of their players, hard to test all kinds of pc configurations. Now they have telemetry showing that it doesn't matter because another parallel task takes about as much time anyway.

Maybe it's changed a lot statistically in the last few years but for long time PC gamers used to have the mantra of small SSD for the OS and large HDD for games if they're price conscious so I could see that being assumed to be much more normal during development.

It's a shameful tragedy of the commons if you bloat your game 6x because you think your customers don't have enough SSD space for their active games.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#216

Post by teamonkey »

khannn wrote: post #190
jy14898 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their concern was that one person in a squad loading on HDD could slow down the level loading for all players in a squad, even if they used a SSD, so they used a very normal and time-tested optimisation technique to prevent that.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#217

Post by braiamp »

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?

It didn't. They downloaded 43 GB instead of 152 GB, according to SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/ Now it is 20 GB => 21 GB. Steam is pretty good at deduplicating data in transit from their servers. They are not idiots that will let developers/publishers eat their downstream connection with duplicated data.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading#AppStructur...

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#218

Post by Dylan16807 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #214
lordnikon001 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

WebDevs who have build systems that take ten minutes and download tens of megabytes of JS and have hundreds of milliseconds of lag are sooooooooooooo not allowed to complain about game devs ever.

Oh, at first I thought you were talking about websites doing that and I was going to say "sure, those people can't complain, but the rest of us can".

Then I realized you said build systems and eh, whatever. It's not good for build systems to be bloated, but it matters a lot less than the end product being bloated.

And you seem to be complaining about the people that are dealing with these build systems themselves, not inflicting them on other people? Why don't they get to complain?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#219

Post by snet0 »

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…

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#220

Post by tlonny »

If this is somewhat common for games, could one create a virtual fs with FUSE that dedupes using via content-defined chunking and install games there?

I feel like writes would probably be quite painful, but with game assets are essentially write-once read-forever so not the end of the world?

As an aside, its messed up that people with expensive SSDs are unnecessarily paying this storage tax. Just feels lazy...

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