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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

#141

Post by the_af »

jeroenhd wrote: post #119
nearbuy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this means that before they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing how their game performed with and without it?

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

#142

Post by PunchyHamster »

clusterhacks wrote: post #63
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…

I started my career as a software performance engineer. We measured everything across different code implementations, multiple OS, hardware systems, and in various network configurations. It was amazing how often people wanted to optimize stuff that wasn't a bottleneck in overall performance. Real bottlenecks were often easy to see when you measured and usually simple to fix. But it was also tough work in the org. It…

It's because patting yourself on the back for getting 5x performance increase in microbenchmark feels good and looks good on yearly review.

> But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.

Misaligned budgeting and goals is bane of good engineering. I've seen some absolutely stupid stuff like outsourcing hosting a simple site to us, because client would rather hire 3rd party to buy domain and put a simple site there (some advertising), than to deal with their own security guys and host it on their own infrastructure.

"It's a cost center" "So is fucking HR, why you don't fire them ?" "Uh, I'll ignore that, pls just invoice anything you do to other teams" ... "Hey, they bought cloud solution that doesn't work/they can't figure it out, can you help them" "But we HAVE stuff doing that cheaper and easier, why they didn't come to us" "Oh they thought cloud will be cheaper and just work after 5 min setup"

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

#144

Post by JohnBooty »

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…

    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.
From a technical perspective, the key thing to know is that the console install size for HD2 was always that small -- their build process assumed SSD on console so it didn't duplicate stuff.

154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :)

How did it get so bad on PC?

Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly.

This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid

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

#146

Post by PunchyHamster »

superkuh wrote: post #135
deng wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...

It is no surprise to me that people still have to use HDD for storage. SSD stopped getting bigger a decade plus ago. SSD sizes are still only equal to the HDD sizes available and common in 2010 (a couple TB~). SSD size increases (availability+price decreases) for consumers form factors have entirely stopped. There is no more progress for SSD because quad level cells are as far as the charge trap tech can be pushed an…

I bought 4x (1TB->4TB the storage for half the price after my SSD died after 5 years (thanks samsung), what you mean they 'stopped being bigger'?

Sure, there is some limitation in format, can only shove so many chips on M.2, but you can get U.2 ones that are bigger than biggest HDD (tho price is pretty eye-watering)

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

#147

Post by crest »

account42 wrote: post #112
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…

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 rea…

Which describes both the PS2, PS3, PS4, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii, and Xbox 360. The PS4 had a 2.5" SATA slot but the idiots didn't hook it up to the chipsets existing SATA port, but added a slow USB2.0SATA chip. So since the sunset of the N64 all stationary gaming consoles have been held back by slow (optical) storage with even worse seek times.

Some many game design crimes have a storage limitation at their core e.g. levels that are just a few rooms connected by tunnels or elevators.

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

#148

Post by PunchyHamster »

bombcar wrote: post #35
PoignardAzur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.

Honestly looking over time I think that phrase did more bad than good.

Yes, of course you shouldn't optimize before you get your critical path stable and benchmark which parts take too much.

But many, many times it is used as excuse to delay optimisation so far that it is now hard to do because it would require to rewriting parts that "work just fine", or it is skipped because the slowness is just at tolerable level.

I have a feeling just spending 10-20% more time on a piece of code to give it a glance whether it couldn't be more optimal would pay for itself very quickly compared to bigger rewrite months after code was written.

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

#149

Post by jasomill »

throw0101c wrote: post #13
rwmj wrote: post #4

23GB 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... * ht…

For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.

The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:

Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.

Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.

Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.

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

#150

Post by radlad »

the_af wrote: post #141
jeroenhd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this means that before they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing how their game performed with and without it?

Yes, but I think maybe people in this thread are painting it unfairly? Another way to frame it is that they used industry best practices and their intuition to develop the game, then revisited their decisions to see if they still made sense. When they didn't, they updated the game. It's normal for any product to be imperfect on initial release. It's part of actually getting to market.
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