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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#241

Post by Zarathruster »

rincebrain wrote: post #65
everdrive wrote: post #59

I 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.

Yeah the "Crash to Desktop" comedy spell wasn't added to the game for no good reason.

I do credit their sense of humor about it though.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#242

Post by FieryMechanic »

XorNot wrote: post #237
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…

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…

This was pretty much my take as well. I have an older CPU, Motherboard and GPU combo before the newer GPU power cables that obviously weren't tested properly and I have no problems with stability.

These guys are running an intensive game on the highest difficulty, while streaming and they probably have a bunch of browser windows and other software running background. Any weakness in the system is going to be revealed.

I had performance issues during that time and I had to restart game every 5 matches. But it takes like a minute to restart the game.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#243

Post by eurekin »

XorNot wrote: post #237
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…

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…

Trust me, I'm a software developer with more than two decades of experience. Have been dabbling in hardware since the Amiga 500 era. "I have that specific set of skills" that allows me to narrow down a class of issues pretty well - just a lot of component switching in a binary divide and conquer fashion across hardware.

The issue is 1) actually exaggarated in the community, but not without actual substance 2) getting disregarded exactly because of exaggarations. It was a very real thing.

I also happen to have a multi gpu workstation that works flawlessly too

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#244

Post by reactordev »

WheatMillington wrote: post #189
reactordev wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size of team has no bearing in this argument. Saying they were small so they get a pass at preventing obscene download sizes is like saying “Napster was created by one man, surely he shouldn’t be accountable” but he was. When making a game, once you have something playable, is to figure out how to package it. This is included in that effort. Determining which assets to compress, package, and ship. Sometimes this is d…

Amount of resources absolutely has a bearing on how resources can be allocated.

This isn’t a resourcing issue. It’s a lack of knowledge and skipped a step issue.

When I did this. My small team took a whole sprint to make sure that assets were packed. That tilemaps were made. That audio files were present and we did an audit to make sure nothing extra was packaged on disk. Today, because of digital stores and just releasing zip files, no one cares what they ship and often you can see it if you investigate the files of any Unity or Unreal engine game. Just throw it all over the fence.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#245

Post by teamonkey »

khannn wrote: post #231
teamonkey wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nonsense. I play it on a 512GB SSD and it’s fine.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#246

Post by colechristensen »

maccard wrote: post #209
kappaking wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comp…

Super Mario 64, widely recognized as one of the most iconic influential games ever... was released with a build that didn't have the compiler optimizations turned on. They proved this by decompiling it and with the exact right compiler and tools recompiling it with the non-optimized arguments. Recompiling with the optimizations turned on resulted in no problems and significant performance boosts.

One of the highest rated games ever released without devs turning on the "make it faster" button which would have required approximately zero effort and had zero downsides.

This kind of stuff happens because the end result A vs. B doesn't make that much of a difference.

And it's very hard to have a culture of quality that doesn't get overrun by zealots who will bankrupt you while they squeeze the last 0.001% of performance out of your product before releasing. It is very had to have a culture of quality that does the important things and doesn't do the unimportant ones.

The people who obsess with quality go bankrupt and the people who obsess with releasing make money. So that's what we get.

A very fine ability for evaluating quality mixed with pragmatic choice for what and when to spend time on it is rare.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#247

Post by forrestthewoods »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #218
forrestthewoods wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, no…

Download bloat is net less impactful than build time bloat imho. Game download and install size bloat is bad. But is a mostly one time cost. Build time bloat doesn’t directly impact users, but iteration time is GodKing so bad build times indirectly hurt consumers.

But that’s all beside the point. What I was really doing was criticizing the HN commenters. HN posters are mostly webdevs because most modern programmers are webdevs. And while I won’t say the file bloat here wasn’t silly, I wonder stand for game dev slander from devs that commit faaaaaaaaaaaaaar greater sins.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#248

Post by mort96 »

Cyphusx wrote: post #202
kappaking wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And this really shouldn't surprise professionals in an industry where everything's always about development velocity and releasing Minimum Viable Products as quickly into the market as possible.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#249

Post by nearbuy »

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…

This is a mischaracterization of the optimization. This isn't a standard optimization that games apply everywhere. It's an optimization for spinning disks that some games apply sometimes. They're expected to measure if the benefits are worth the cost. (To be clear, bundling assets is standard. Duplicating at this level is not.)

This doesn't advance accepted industry wisdom because:

1. The trade-off is very particular to the individual game. Their loading was CPU-bound rather than IO-bound so the optimization didn't make much difference for HDDs. This is already industry wisdom. The amount of duplication was also very high in their game.

2. This optimization was already on its way out as SSDs take over and none of the current gen consoles use HDDs.

I'm not mad at Arrowhead or trying to paint them negatively. Every game has many bugs and mishaps like this. I appreciate the write-up.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#250

Post by gfaster »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #239
gfaster wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 complainin…

> that is asinine and unscientific

Well, yes. I did say something to that effect. Blaming BSODs on invasive anti-cheat out of principle is a political position, not a scientific one.

> 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.

I understand what you're saying here, but anyone who does a substantial amount of systems programming could tell you that hardware-dependent behavior is evidence for a hardware problem, but does not necessarily rule out a software bug that only manifests on certain hardware. For example, newer hardware could expose a data race because one path is much faster. Alternatively, a subroutine implemented with new instructions could be incorrect.

Regardless, I don't doubt that this issue with Helldivers 2 was caused by (or at least surfaced by) certain hardware, but that does not change that given such an issue, I would presume the culprit is kernel anticheat until presented strong evidence to the contrary.

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