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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#231

Post by khannn »

teamonkey wrote: post #216
khannn wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their technique makes it so that the normal person with a ~base SSD of 512 GB can't reasonably install the game. Heck of a job Brownie.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#232

Post by ycombinatrix »

maccard wrote: post #210
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…

> 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.

>The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download

All Steam downloads are automatically compressed. It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#233

Post by XorNot »

teamonkey wrote: post #228
mort96 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first impression matters is the thing. This was John Carmacks idea on how to sell interlacing to smartphone display makers for VR: the upsell he had was that there's one very important moment when a consumer sees a new phone: they pick it up, open something and flick it and that scroll effect better be a silky smooth 60 FPS or more or there's trouble. (His argument was making that better would be a side effect of what he really wanted).

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#234

Post by mort96 »

zamadatix wrote: post #188
colechristensen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Eh probably not, it's probably handled by some automated system when making release builds of the game. Sure, implementing that initially was probably some work (or maybe it was just checking a checkbox in some tool), but there's probably not much manual work involved anymore to keep it going.

Reverting it now though, when the game is out there on a million systems, requires significant investigation to ensure they're not making things significantly worse for anyone, plus a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't outright break stuff.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#235

Post by wtallis »

kbolino wrote: post #225
consp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 milli seconds to wait for the…

> On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 138 microseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track.

You did the math for 7200 rotations per second, not 7200 rotations per minute = 120 rotations per second.

In gaming terms, you get at most one or two disk reads per frame, which effectively means everything has to be carefully prefetched well in advance of being needed. Whereas on a decade-old SATA SSD you get at least dozens of random reads per frame.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#236

Post by kbolino »

wtallis wrote: post #235
kbolino wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 milli seconds to wait for the…

> On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 138 microseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track. You did the math for 7200 rotations per second, not 7200 rotations per minute = 120 rotations per second. In gaming terms, you get at most one or two disk reads per frame, which effectively means everything has to be carefully prefetched well in advance of being needed.…

Fixed!

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#237

Post by XorNot »

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…

It's basically an Internet fable at this point that there's "a game that physically damages your hardware".

The answer to every such claim is just: no. But it's click bait gold to the brain damage outrage YouTuber brigade.

Accidentally using a ton of resources might e reveal weaknesses, but it is absolutely not any software vendors problem that 100% load might reveal your thermal paste application sucked or Nvidia is skimping on cable load balancing.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#238

Post by duskwuff »

ycombinatrix wrote: post #232
maccard wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download All Steam downloads are automatically compressed. It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.

> The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.

Even when Titanfall 2 was released in 2016, I don't think that was meaningfully the case. Audio compression formats have been tuned heavily for efficient playback.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#239

Post by FieryMechanic »

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

> In that case I believe it's fair to disregard all other epistemological processes and blame BSODs on the game out of principle

I am sorry but that is asinine and unscientific. You should blame BSODs on what is causing them. I don't like kernel anti-cheat but I will blame the actual cause of the issues, not assign blame on things which I don't approve of.

I am a long time Linux user and many of the people complaining about BSODs on Windows had a broken the OS in one way or another. Some were running weird stuff like 3rd party shell extensions that modify core DLLs, or they had installed every POS shovelware/shareware crap. That isn't Microsoft's fault if you start running an unsupported configuration of the OS.

Similarly. The YouTubers that were most vocal about HellDivers problems did basically no proper investigation other than saying "look it crashed", when it was quite clearly their broken hardware that was the issue. As previously stated their CPU had a burn mark on one of the pins, some AM5 had faults that caused this IIRC. So everything indicated hardware failure being the cause of the BSOD. They still blamed the game, probably because it got them more watch time.

During the same time period when people were complaining about BSODs, I didn't experience one. I was running the same build of the game as them and playing on the same difficulty and sometimes recording it via OBS (just like they were). What I didn't have was a AM5 motherboard, I have and older AM4 motherboard which doesn't have these problems.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#240

Post by FieryMechanic »

eurekin wrote: post #197
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…

> > - 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…

If that is happening, they need to do a Steam Integrity check. I understand the game is buggy, but it isn't that buggy.
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