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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#221

Post by Dylan16807 »

hbn wrote: post #62
BizarroLand wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.

Nintendo is pretty good for putting a solid 1.0 version of their games on the cartridges on release. But on the other hand, the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long as they keep the servers online so you could download a digital purchase. I've kinda given up on physical games a…

Are you sure those flashes are capable of refreshing?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#222

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#223

Post by vict7 »

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…

Many players perceive Arrowhead as a pretty incompetent and untrustworthy developer. Helldivers has suffered numerous issues with both performance and balancing. The bugs constantly introduced into the game (not the fun kind you get to shoot with a gun) have eroded a lot of trust and good will towards the company and point towards a largely non-existent QA process.

I won’t state my own personal views here, but for those that share the above perspective, there is little benefit of the doubt they’ll extend towards Arrowhead.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#224

Post by ycombinatrix »

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…

Wasn't that Titanfall 1? I remember Titanfall 2 having a much smaller installation size.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#225

Post by kbolino »

consp wrote: post #208
abtinf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until you get to super-high-res textures and the like, the throughput isn't nearly as important as the latency.

At 200 MB/s the way hard drives usually measure it, you're able to read up to 390,625 512-byte blocks in 1 second, or to put it another way, a block that's immediately available under the head can be read in 2.56 microseconds. On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 8.33 milliseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track. Even if these were the only constraints, sequentially arranging data you know you'll need to have available at the same time cuts latency by a factor of about 3000.

It's much harder to find precise information about the speed of the head arm, but it also usually takes several milliseconds to move from the innermost track to the outermost track or vice versa. In the worst case, this would double the random seek time, since the platter has to spin around again because the head wasn't in position yet. Also, since hard drives are so large nowadays, the file system allocators actually tend to avoid fragmentation upfront, leading to generally having few fragments for large files (YMMV).

So, the latency on a hard drive can be tolerable when optimized for.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#226

Post by jayd16 »

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…

"Self fulfilling prophecy" perhaps?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#227

Post by mschuster91 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #149
mschuster91 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron." The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung. Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all featur…

Or these devs & users can migrate to a PWA. Which will have vastly less overhead. Because it is shared, because each of those 10 apps you mention would be (or could be, if they have ok data architecture) tiny.

> Or these devs & users can migrate to a PWA

PWAs have the problem that for every interaction with the "real world" they need browser approval. While that is for a good reason, it also messes with the expectations of the user, and some stuff such as unrestricted access to the file system isn't available to web apps at all.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#228

Post by teamonkey »

mort96 wrote: post #194
teamonkey wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even at the end of development it’s a sensible choice. It’s the default strategy for catering to machines with slow disk access. The risk of some players experiencing slow load times is catastrophic at launch. In absence of solid user data, it’s a fine assumption to make.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#229

Post by ycombinatrix »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #182
Xelbair wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $$$$

All companies should also defraud & rug pull their customers.

It will make them a lot of money and is thus the right call. Who cares about customers am I right? They'd still be rolling in $$$$.

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