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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#291

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jsheard wrote: post #49
habbekrats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do they even sell disc of these game?...

They do, but it's irrelevant to performance nowadays since you're required to install all of the disc data to the SSD before you can play. The PS3/360 generation was the last time you could play games directly from a disc (and even then some games had an install process).

I believe even then it was already "most", at least for the PS3; that was the era where always-online devices became the norm, where game developers were more eager to release patches after release, etc.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#292

Post by KronisLV »

abtinf wrote: post #163
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…

Part of what makes this outrageous is that the install size itself is probably a significant part of the reason to install the game on an HDD. 154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive. Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in…

> 154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.

I think War Thunder did it the best:

  * Minimal client 23 GB
  * Full client 64 GB
  * Ultra HQ ground models 113 GB
  * Ultra HQ aircraft 92 GB
  * Full Ultra HQ 131 GB
For example, I will never need anything more than the full client, whereas if I want to play on a laptop, I won't really need more than the minimal client (limited textures and no interiors for planes).

The fact that this isn't commonplace in every engine and game out there is crazy. There's no reason why the same approach couldn't also work for DLCs and such. And there's no reason why this couldn't be made easy in every game engine out there (e.g. LOD level 0 goes to HQ content bundle, the lower ones go into the main package). Same for custom packages for like HDDs and such.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#293

Post by maccard »

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.

> All Steam downloads are automatically compressed.

Titanfall wasn't on steam when it launched.

> It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.

The person that I replied to (not you) claimed "They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute."

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#294

Post by SirAiedail »

Hendrikto wrote: post #58
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild

> our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknown…

Non-made up numbers from Vermintide 2 (same engine): On PS4 when an optimized build took around 1.5 minutes to boot to main menu, the unoptimized version would take 12-15 minutes [1]. A different benchmark than SSD vs HDD, but shows that the optimization was certainly needed at the time. Though the PS4 was partially to blame as well, with it's meagre 5400 RPM spinny drive.

For their newer instalment, Fatshark went with a large rework of the engine's bundle system, and players on HDDs are complaining about long loading times expectedly. That game is still large at ~80GB, but not from duplication.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/hxkh0x/comment/...

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#295

Post by creshal »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #275
wtallis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Sony said about their SSD was that it enabled game developers to not duplicate assets like they did for rotating storage. One specific example I recall in Sony's presentation was the assets for a mailbox used in a Spider Man game, with hundreds of copies of that mailbox duplicated on disk because the game divided Manhattan into chunks and tried to have all the assets for each chunk stored more or less contiguous…

Weird, since that's a benefit of any kind of SSD at all. The stuff their fancy implementation made possible was per-frame loading, not just convenient asset streaming. But uh if the devs didn't realize that, I blame them. It's their job to know basics like that.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Sony was extremely deceptive in how they marketed the PS5 to devs, and the Helldivers dev don't want to admit how completely they fell for it.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#296

Post by creshal »

maccard wrote: post #205
creshal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really understand your point. You're making a very definitive statement about how the PS5's SSD architecture is responsible for this issue - when the isssue is on a totally different platform, where they have _already_ attempted (poorly, granted) to handle the different architectures.

No. Please try reading more carefully.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#297

Post by creshal »

mary-ext wrote: post #54
creshal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Industry hearsay" in this case was probably Sony telling game devs how awesome the PS5's custom SSD was gonna be, and nobody bothered to check their claims.

the industry hearsay is about concern of HDD load times tho

HDD load times compared to......?

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#298

Post by sigmoid10 »

eurekin wrote: post #154
sigmoid10 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony nearly killed all good will the game had accrued when they tried to use the massive player base as an opportunity to force people into their worthless ecosystem. I don't think Sony even has the capability to make good technical decisions here, they are just the publisher. It was always Arrowhead trying to keep up with their massive success that they clearly weren't prepared for at all. In the beginning they simp…

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,…

>I specifically referred the Shams Jorjani's (CEO of ArrowHead) explanation to Hermen Hulst (the head of PlayStation Studios) why the review score collapsed to 19%, among other issues.

I don't know what you mean. The game literally got 84,000 negative reviews within 24 hours after Sony tried to force PSN on everyone. No bug or missing feature ever came anywhere close to this kind of negative sentiment toward the game.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#299

Post by Dylan16807 »

creshal wrote: post #295
Dylan16807 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, since that's a benefit of any kind of SSD at all. The stuff their fancy implementation made possible was per-frame loading, not just convenient asset streaming. But uh if the devs didn't realize that, I blame them. It's their job to know basics like that.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Sony was extremely deceptive in how they marketed the PS5 to devs, and the Helldivers dev don't want to admit how completely they fell for it.

It's incompetence if they "fell for" such basic examples being presented in the wrong context. 5% of the blame can go to Sony, I guess, if that's what happened.

And on top of any potential confusion between normal SSD and fancy SSD, a mailbox is a super tiny asset and the issue in the spiderman game is very rapidly cycling city blocks in and out of memory. That's so different from helldivers level loading.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#300

Post by maccard »

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.

It's easy to apply todays standards. Titanfall was released 11 years ago, and ran on an Xbox 360, and a Core 2 Duo. MP3 was a patent encumbered format. There's a fun DF article [0] where they say:

> Titanfall accesses Microsoft's existing cloud network, with servers spooling up on demand. When there's no demand, those same servers will service Azure's existing customers. Client-side, Titanfall presents a dedicated server experience much like any other but from the developer and publisher perspective, the financials in launching an ambitious online game change radically.

Things changed _massively_ in games between 2014 and 2017 - we went from supporting borderline embedded level of platforms with enormous HW constraints, architecture differences, and running dedicated servers like the 90's, to basically supporting fixed spec PCs, and shipping always online titles running on the cloud.

[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-...

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