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Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

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Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#3

Did the duplicated files were even used on pc? Like, do you even have such low access to the file system that you can deduce which duplicated instance has a faster access time on a mechanical hard drive?

Not sure if this is what they did, but you can just put all the things you need together sequentially into a single file and rely on the filesystem to allocate contiguous blocks where possible (using the appropriate size hints to help). It's trivial unpack at loading time without any performance impact.

A filesystem is by itself just one big "file" acting like a file archive.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#7
I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here.

Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around...

The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by hash" option in the build, on a tree with copies of assets scattered everywhere, and it was just nobody had ever checked if the fear around the option was based on outcomes.

(I know they said in the original blog post that it was based around fears of client performance impact, but the whole reason I'm staring at that is that if it's just a deduplication table at storage time, the client shouldn't...care? It's not writing to the game data archives, it's just looking stuff up either way...)

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#8
post #4

23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!

Yes. High resolution textures take up a lot of space. Have a look at HD texture mods for skyrim for example. 23GB is more in line with a game from a few years ago, so this really is slim for a modern game with modern graphics.
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