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

tomshardware.com

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

#111

Post by weavejester »

afavour wrote: post #45
snet0 wrote: post #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 wi…

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.

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

#112

Post by account42 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #93
afavour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear reads may be warranted is optical media.

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

#113

Post by zelphirkalt »

WreckVenom wrote: post #54
fleabitdev wrote: post #28

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher. In other words, t…

From the story: > Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect. It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and p…

Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only download the textures they need up to that resolution?

Questions, questions, questions.

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

#114

Post by fleabitdev »

dotwaffle wrote: post #89
fleabitdev wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the bug was 131 GB of wasted disk space after installation. Because the waste came from duplicate files, it should have had little impact on download size (unless there's a separate bug in the installer...) This is why the cost of the bug was so easy for the studio to ignore. An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years, so they might ha…

> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is…

Isn't it a little reductive to look at basic infrastructure costs? I used Hetzner as a surrogate for the raw cost of bandwidth, plus overheads. If you need to serve data outside Europe, the budget tier of BunnyCDN is four times more expensive than Hetzner.

But you might be right - in a market where the price of the same good varies by two orders of magnitude, I could believe that even the nice vendors are charging a 400% markup.

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

#115

Post by WreckVenom »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #105
fleabitdev wrote: post #28

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher. In other words, t…

I should probably look up the company that made the game or the publisher and avoid games they make in the future.

That would be a shame because the game is honestly very good despite its flaws, is a lot of fun and has a decent community.

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

#116

Post by zelphirkalt »

afavour wrote: post #45
snet0 wrote: post #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 wi…

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

Which goes to show, that they don't care about the user, but only about the user's money.

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

#117

Post by Narishma »

vardump wrote: post #87
robin_reala wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.

Rather 89% PC players have an SSD. For the console players much less. People (read: hordes of kids) are still using PS3, PS4, etc.

I think they were talking specifically about this game, which is only available on PS5 and PC.

Edit: Forgot it was released recently on Xbox Series consoles but those also have SSDs.

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

#118

Post by jquery »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #61
amlib wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I have two SSDs in my main machine I still use a hard drive as an overflow for games that I judge are not SSD worthy. Because it's a recent 20TB HDD the read speeds approach 250MB/s and I've also specifically partitioned it at the beginning of the disk just for games so that it can sustain full transfer speeds without files falling into the slower tracks, the rest of the disk is then partitioned for media…

I install all my games on HDD but then use PrimoCache for RAM https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

PrimoCache is awesome, highly recommended. I’d only say to make sure your computer is rock stable before installing it, in my limited experience it exponentially increases the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer is unstable.

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

#119

Post by jeroenhd »

nearbuy wrote: post #100
jeroenhd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

According to the post, "the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most." It didn't help their game load noticeably faster. They just hadn't checked if the optimization actually helped.

The actual source (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...) says:

> Only a few seconds difference?

> Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that 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 unknowns.

> Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, 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. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.

They measured first, accepted the minimal impact, and then changed their game.

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

#120

Post by zelphirkalt »

haritha-j wrote: post #75

I recently downloaded Hunt showdown. I think it was around 70 gigs. About a month later, I had to update it. The download was the same size. I think they literally just overrode the entire game because they were too lazy to update it properly.

I observed this too with some other games. Really annoying, when you need to redownload tens of gigabytes , because they cannot be arsed to put a proper updater. Things that were solved by most games way before Steam became even big.
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