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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#251

Post by aftbit »

debugnik wrote: post #161
aftbit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most recent Battlefield released at $80. Arc Raiders released at $40 with a $20 deluxe edition upgrade. I think $40 for a game like Helldivers 2 is totally fair. It's a fun game, worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime.

> worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime. Is that supposed to be praise?

Ah sorry, I thought "at least" would carry this statement. I've played Helldivers for more than 250 hours personally.

For some reason, though, I tend to compare everything to movie theater tickets. In my head (though it's not true anymore), a movie ticket costs $8 and gives me 1 hour of entertainment. Thus anything that gives me more than 1 hour per $8 is a good deal.

$40 / 4 => $10/hr

$40 / 8 => $5/hr

Thus, I think Helldivers is a good deal for entertainment even if you only play it for under 10 hours.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#252

Post by aftbit »

entropie wrote: post #166
debugnik wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime. Is that supposed to be praise?

Its also wrong. With 10 hours of helldivers 2 you havent seen much of the game at all. I played it a bit after release and have 230 hours. I liked the game and it was worth my money.

Yeah, I meant "at least" 4-8 hours. Even if you get bored and give up after that, you've gotten your money's worth, in my opinion.

I have almost 270 hours in Helldivers 2 myself. Like any multiplayer game, it can expand to fill whatever amount of time you want to dedicate to it, and there's always something new to learn or try.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#253

Post by nearbuy »

duskwuff wrote: post #238
ycombinatrix wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Uncompressed audio is typically used for sound effects, while music is compressed. Latency is the primary benefit. Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay. Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful.

Games also can stack many sounds, so even if the decoding cost is negligible when playing a single sound, it'll be greater if you have 32 sounds playing at once.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#254

Post by thunderfork »

embedding-shape wrote: post #140
heftig wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, walking backwards (away from the target) reduced your bullet velocity relative to the target, reducing the damage you were doing and leading to you needing more shots.

And to be extra clear, either way, neither options makes me believe it was an intentional design choice.

Systems-driven gameplay is an intentional design choice all unto itself

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#255

Post by ender341341 »

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?

depending on how the data duplication is actually done (like texture atlasing the actual bits can be very different after image compression) it can be much harder to do rote bit level deduplication. They could potentially ship the code to generate all of those locally, but then they have to deal with a lot of extra rights/contracts to do so (proprietary codecs/tooling is super, super common in gamedev), and

Also largely cause devs/publishers honestly just don't really think about it, they've been doing it as long as optical media has been prevalent (early/mid 90s) and for the last few years devs have actually been taking a look and realizing it doesn't make as much sense as it used to, especially if like in this case the majority of the time is spent on runtime generation of, or if they require a 2080 as minimum specs whats the point of optimizing for 1 low end component if most people running it are on high end systems.

Hitman recently (4 years ago) did a similar massive file shrink and mentioned many of the same things.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#256

Post by bigstrat2003 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #199
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…

But this isn't an optimization. The 150+GB size is the "optimization", one that never actually helped with anything. The whole news here is "Helldivers 2 stopped intentionally screwing its customers". I don't see why it's a surprise that people react "negatively", in the sense of being mad that (a) Helldivers 2 was intentionally screwing the customers before, and (b) everyone else is still doing it.

> The whole news here is "Helldivers 2 stopped intentionally screwing its customers".

That is an extremely disingenuous way to frame the issue.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#257

Post by myself248 »

braiamp wrote: post #217
nopurpose wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Furthermore, this raises the possibility of a "de-debloater" that HDD users could run, which would duplicate the data into its loading-optimized form, if they decided they wanted to spend the space on it. (And a "de-de-debloater" to recover the space when they're not actively playing the game...)

The whole industry could benefit from this.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#258

Post by FieryMechanic »

gfaster wrote: post #250
FieryMechanic wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

> 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.

When there are actual valid concerns about the anti-cheat, these will be ignored because of people that assigned blame to it when unwarranted. This is why making statements based on your ideology can be problematic.

> 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.

People were claiming it was causing hardware damage which is extremely unlikely since both Intel, AMD and most hardware manufacturers have mechanisms which prevent this. This isn't some sort of opaque race condition.

> RI would presume the culprit is kernel anti-cheat until presented strong evidence to the contrary.

You should know that if you making assumptions without evidence that will often lead you astray.

I don't like kernel anti-cheat and would prefer for it not to exist, but making stupid statements based on ideology instead of evidence just makes you look silly.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#259

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

> Oh, at first I thought you were talking about websites doing that

I'm pretty sure that is in fact what he meant, and that "have build systems" is a typo of "have built systems".

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#260

Post by duskwuff »

nearbuy wrote: post #253
duskwuff wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Uncompressed audio is typically used for sound effects, while music is compressed. Latency is the primary benefit. Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay. Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful. Games also can stack many sounds, so even if the decoding cost is negligible when playing a single soun…

> Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Encoding latency is only relevant when you're dealing with live audio streams - there's no delay inherent to playing back a recorded sound.

> Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful.

Not all sound effects are short (consider e.g. loops for ambient noise!), and the aggregate file size for uncompressed audio can be substantial across an entire game.

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