23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!
I do love rich soundtracks with high quality compression, and textures that look crisp on 4k. And also games with 100+ hours of single-player campaign.
Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
11–20 of 297 posts
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#12I'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 has…
I'm not entirely clear what you're trying to say, but, my understanding is that they simply put lots of copies of files in lots of places like games have done for a long time, in the hopes it would lower seek times on HDDs for those players who use them.
They realised, after a lot of players asking, that it wasn't necessary, and probably had less of an impact than they thought.
They removed the duplicates, and drastically cut the install size. I updated last night, and the update alone was larger than the entire game after this deduplication run, so I'll be opting in to the Beta ASAP.
It's been almost a decade since I ran spinning rust in a desktop, and while I admire their efforts to support shitty hardware, who's playing this on a machine good enough to play but can't afford £60 for a basic SSD for their game storage?
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#1323GB is supposed to be "slim"?!
Back in the day:
> 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […]
* https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/Return_to_Castle_Wol...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
Even older games would be even smaller:
* https://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/ultima-vi-the-false-prophet/...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VI:_The_False_Prophet
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#1423GB is supposed to be "slim"?!
I mean yes, it's a very nice looking game with fairly sizeable worlds and lots of different enemies, biomes, etc.
It's currently over 100GB because of duplicated assets, so this is a game-changer (pun intended).
EDIT: Just checked; 157GB on my SSD.
EDIT2: 26GB after updating with a 9.7GB download, 5.18GB of shaders before and after.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#15Possibly a similar process to when you go into an AWS account, and find dozens of orphaned VMs, a few thousand orphaned disk volumes, etc., saving like $10k/month just deleting unused resources.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#16> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time.”
It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly seems strange from the outside for this optimisation to be both possible and acceptable.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#17Did 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?
It's not which duplicated instance....
Think of it as I have two packs for levels.
Creek.level and roboplanet.level
Both use the cyborg enemies, by duplicating the cyborg enemy model and texture data across both files, Only the level file needs to be opened to get all nessecary data for a match.
Because modern OS will allow you to preallocate contiguous segments and have auto defrag, you can have it read this level file at max speed, rather than having to stop and seek to go find cyborg.model file because it was referenced by the spawn pool. Engine limitations may prevent other optimisations you think up as a thought exercise after reading this.
It's similar to how crash bandicoot packed their level data to handle the slow speed of the ps1 disc drive.
As to why they had a HDD optimisation in 2024... Shrugs
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#18Possibly a similar process to when you go into an AWS account, and find dozens of orphaned VMs, a few thousand orphaned disk volumes, etc., saving like $10k/month just deleting unused resources.
We've all been there Jeff.
In this case, I don't think it was forgetfulness; unlike us, they have an excuse and they were trying to optimise for disk seek times.
Anyway, I've got a half-dozen cloud accounts I need to go check for unused resources waves.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#19> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…
From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#20> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…
I don't find it surprising at all. A ton of developers do optimizations based on vibes and very rarely check if they're actually getting a real benefit from it.