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If this article was exciting for you, I also highly recommend this one. A random dude fixed a bug in GTA 5 that was the root cause of it loading insanely slowly since the game came out! https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...
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It's because shitting on game devs is the trendy thing these days, even among more technically inclined crowds unfortunately. It seems like there's a general unwillingness to accept that game development is hard and you can't just wave the magic "optimize" wand at everything when your large project is also a world of edge cases. But it seems like it should be that simple according to all the armchair game devs on the…
Meh, the same is true for almost every discussion on the internet, everyone is an expert armchair for whatever subject you come across, and when you ask them about their experience it boils down to "I read lots of Wikipedia articles". I mean I agree with you, that it is trendy and seemingly easy, to shit on other people's work, and at this point it seems to be a challenge people take up upon themselves, to criticise…
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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.
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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 a…
> Download bloat is net less impactful than build time bloat imho.
Download bloat is a bad problem for people on slow connections, and there's a lot of people on slow connections. I really dislike when people don't take that into account.
And even worse if they're paying by the gigabyte in a country with bad wireless prices, that's so much money flushed down the drain.
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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 (consi…
There absolutely is. You can decompress compressed audio files when loading so they play immediately, but if you want to keep your mp3 compressed, you get a delay. Games keep the sound effects in memory uncompressed.
> Not all sound effects are short
Long ambient background noises often aren't latency sensitive and can be streamed. For most games textures are the biggest usage of space and audio isn't that significant, but every game is different. I'm just telling you why we use uncompressed audio. If there is a particular game you know of that's wasting a lot of space on large audio files, you should notify the devs.
There is a reason both Unity and Unreal use uncompressed audio or ADPCM for sound effects.
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>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.
I was trying to point out that the decision to compress or not compress audio likely has nothing to do with the download size.
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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 a…
Web devs are not a hivemind. That kind of criticism doesn't work well at all when pointed at the entirety of the site. > Download bloat is net less impactful than build time bloat imho. Download bloat is a bad problem for people on slow connections, and there's a lot of people on slow connections. I really dislike when people don't take that into account. And even worse if they're paying by the gigabyte in a country…
For consoles total disk space is an even bigger constraint than download size. But file size is a factor. Call of Duty is known to be egregious. It’s a much more complex problem than most people realize. Although hopefully not as trivial a fix as Helldivers!
In any case HN has a broadly dismissive attitude towards gamedevs. It is irksome. And deeply misplaced. YMMV.
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> 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.
Bullshit. This is not a problem since 2003.
And nobody forbids you to actually decompress your compressed audio when you are loading the assets from the disk.
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> 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 (consi…
> there's no delay inherent to playing back a recorded sound. There absolutely is. You can decompress compressed audio files when loading so they play immediately, but if you want to keep your mp3 compressed, you get a delay. Games keep the sound effects in memory uncompressed. > Not all sound effects are short Long ambient background noises often aren't latency sensitive and can be streamed. For most games textures…
If that really bothers you then write your own on-disk compression format.
> why we use uncompressed audio
> ADPCM
... which is a compressed and lossy format.
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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.
If the Helldivers devs were influenced by what Sony said, they must have misinterpreted it and taken away an extremely exaggerated impression of how much on-disk duplication was being used for pre-SSD game development. But Sony did actually say quite a bit of directly relevant stuff on this particular matter when introducing the PS5.