Do HDDs make up that much of the gaming market segment?
1/9th of Helldivers 2 players, per TFA.
Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
281–290 of 317 posts
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> but if you want to keep your mp3 compressed, you get a delay 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.
Within the scope of a game’s production, the programmer time spent dogfooding the new audio format can be used towards something else that improves the value of the end product.
The uncompressed audio for latency-sensitive one-shots usually isn’t taking up the bulk of memory either.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Performance profiling should be built into the engine and turned on at all times. Then this telemetry could be streamed into a system that tracks it across all builds, down to a specific scene. It should be possible to click a link on the telemetry server and start the game at that exact point.
How would that help them diagnose a code path that wasn't ever being run (loading non duplicated assets on HDDs)?
> diagnose a code path that wasn't ever being run
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes. The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others. The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire r…
The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.
The tutorial is just fine - here's a gun, here's how you shoot it, here's how you call reinforcements, now go kill some bugs!
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 r…
> The people who obsess with quality go bankrupt and the people who obsess with releasing make money. So that's what we get.
I think this is a little harsh and I’d rephrase the second half to “the people Who obsess with releasing make games”.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#286Earlier 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?
I'm not sure what that is supposed to be - it's an online co op game, not a story-driven one like the 4-6 hour FPS games that was a norm at one point.
It's the kind of game where some people spend thousands of hours in, well worth the $40 to them.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
All other games from the same studio have the same features. In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it. The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.
Just accidentally smashed some teammates with an eagle napalm instead of eagle smoke before I saw this.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
The game logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game. As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in t…
> depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.
It may not be intentional, but it sounds like it's a fun, emergent gameplay mechanic. How much fun have people had with physics and silliness with Valve's Source engine, which was one of the earlier full physics games? Or going back further, "surf" maps in e.g. Unreal Tournament or CS that abused the movement physics to create a movement puzzle (which, arguably, led to some of the movement mechanics in Titanfall).
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#289it seems wild the state of games and development today... imagine 131GB out of 154GB of data was not needed....
This isn't unique to games, and it's not just "today". Go back a decade [0] find people making similar observations about one of the largest tech companies on the planet. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338
And that's consumer apps, having only glimpsed in the world of back-end / cloud shenanigans, there's heaps of data being generated and stored in datacenters. Useful data? Dunno, how useful are all access logs ever?
But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.
Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.
In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger. That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
Maybe, but I'd argue the on-board storage chips literally an inch away from the CPU / GPU of the PS5 are faster these days. But in between cartridge consoles and fast hard drive consoles there was a disk-based gap where seek times were an issue.