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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#301

Post by myself248 »

nomel wrote: post #277
myself248 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> to recover the space when they're not actively playing the game This would defeat the purpose. The goal of the duplication is to place the related data physically close, on the disk. Hard links, removing then replacing, etc, wouldn't preserve the physical spacing of the data, meaning the terrible slow read head has to physically sweep around more. I think the sane approach would be to have a HDD/SDD switch for the…

So you'd have to defrag after re-bloating, to make all the files contiguous again. That tool already exists, and the re-bloater could just call it.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#302

Post by embedding-shape »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #288
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> but it sounds like it's a fun, emergent gameplay mechanic

That you do less damage if you do a certain movement sounds like fun, emergent gameplay? That's not how I understand either of those terms, but of course, every player likes different things.

Surf maps in CS is actually a good example of an engine bug leading to game designers intentionally use it to design new experience, with the keyword being "intentional" since those map makers actually use that bug intentionally. For me that feels very different from engine bugs that don't add any mechanic, and instead just makes the normal game harder.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#303

Post by embedding-shape »

thunderfork wrote: post #254
embedding-shape wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but that doesn't mean every consequence of that choice is suddenly intentional as well.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#304

Post by FieryMechanic »

aftbit wrote: post #252
entropie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would say until you are about level 60 there are a bunch of mechanics that you won't understand.

> 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.

Generally at this point I normally do runs where I go full like gas, stun or full fire builds.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#305

Post by chrisweekly »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #102
chrisweekly wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, cargo cult strikes again!

For today's 10,000: https://www.righto.com/2025/01/its-time-to-abandon-cargo-cul... > The pop-culture cargo cult description, however, takes features of some cargo cults (the occasional runway) and combines this with movie scenes to yield an inaccurate and fictionalized dscription. It may be hard to believe that the description of cargo cults that you see on the internet is mostly wrong, but in the remainder of this…

Thanks. TIL.

FWIW, I meant it strictly in the generic vernacular sense in which I've encountered it: doing something because it has the outward form of something useful or meaningful, without understanding whether or how it works.

Given the problematic history you shared, it seems a new term is needed for this... maybe "Chesterson's Folly"? It's related to Chesterson's Fence (the principle that it's unwise to remove a fence if you don't know why it was erected). If you leave in place all "fences" you don't understand, and never take the time to determine their purpose, fences which serve no good purpose will accumulate.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#306

Post by everdrive »

throwaway902984 wrote: post #287
heftig wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost certainly this occurred on a Rapid Acquisition Mission on K.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#307

Post by nomel »

myself248 wrote: post #301
nomel wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to recover the space when they're not actively playing the game This would defeat the purpose. The goal of the duplication is to place the related data physically close, on the disk. Hard links, removing then replacing, etc, wouldn't preserve the physical spacing of the data, meaning the terrible slow read head has to physically sweep around more. I think the sane approach would be to have a HDD/SDD switch for the…

So you'd have to defrag after re-bloating, to make all the files contiguous again. That tool already exists, and the re-bloater could just call it.

Sure, but defrag is a very slow process, especially if you're re-bloating (since it requires shifting things to make space), and definitely not something that could happen in the background, as the player is playing. Re-bloating definitely wouldn't be good for a quick "Ok, I'm ready to play!".

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#308

Post by immibis »

immibis wrote: post #101
crest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to duplicate assets so loading a "level" is just sequential reading from the file system. It's required on optical media and can be very useful on spinning disks too. On SSDs it's insane. The logic should've been the other way around. Do a speed test on start an offer to "optimise for spinning media" if the performance metrics look like it would help. If the game was ~20GB instead of ~150GB almost no play…

This idea of one continuous block per level dates back to the PS1 days. Hard drives are much, much faster than optical media - on the order of 80 seeks per second and 300 MB/s sequential versus, like, 4 seeks per second and 60 MB/s sequential (for DVD-ROM). You still want to load sequential blocks as much as possible, but you can afford to have a few. (Assuming a traditional engine design, no megatextures etc) you pr…

I meant to write that you probably DON'T want to load each texture from a separate file, but it would be fine to have them in blocks.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#309

Post by debugnik »

aftbit wrote: post #251
debugnik wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks, I get what you meant now. I've never liked this comparison because I don't find movie tickets a particularly good deal, but that might just be my upbringing.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#310

Post by wtallis »

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.

By far the most important thing about the PS5 SSD was the fact that it wasn't optional, and developers would no longer have to care about being able to run off mechanical drives. That has repercussions throughout the broader gaming industry because the game consoles are the lowest common denominator for game developers to target, and getting both Xbox and PlayStation to use SSDs was critical. From the perspective of PlayStation customers and developers, the introduction of the PS5 was the right time to talk about the benefits of SSDs generally.

Everything else about the PS5 SSD and storage subsystem was mere icing on the cake and/or snake oil.

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