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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

#191

Post by darknavi »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #120
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.

It's true for most of the modern web. Hardware and internet connections have come reliable and fast enough for many people not to care.

Unfortunately there are still people on metered/slow connections that really do care still.

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

#192

Post by JohnBooty »

runningRicky wrote: post #94
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…

> I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements I have to check. You're assumption is correct. I am one of very few. I don't know the numbers and I'm gonna check in a sec but I'm wondering whether the suppliers (publishers or whoever is pinning the price) haven't screwed up big time by driving prices and requirements without thinking about the potential customers that they are going to scare away terminally. Th…

I do not think the initial decision-making process was "hey, screw working-class people... let's have a 120GB install size on PC."

My best recollection is that the PC install size was a lot more reasonable at launch. It just crept up over time as they added more content over the last ~2 years.

Should they have addressed this problem sooner? Yes.

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

#194

Post by butlike »

deng wrote: post #59
ga2mer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0]) [0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/

You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... ). I still find these things…

Their update where they got $10k reward from R* brought a smile to my face

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

#195

Post by the_af »

radlad wrote: post #150
the_af wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, I don't think it's a huge sin. It's the kind of mistake all of us make from time to time. And it got corrected, so all's well that ends well.

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

#197

Post by numpad0 »

loeg wrote: post #174
superkuh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SSDs did not "stop getting bigger a decade plus ago." The largest SSD announced in 2015 was 16TB. You can get 128-256TB SSDs today. You can buy 16-32TB consumer SSDs on NewEgg today. Or 8TB in M.2 form factor. In 2015, the largest M.2 SSDs were like 1TB. That's merely a decade. At a decade "plus," SSDs were tiny as recently as 15 years ago.

But the mainstream is still at 500GB-2TB ranges, so...

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

#198

Post by everdrive »

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 read that SSDs don't actually guarantee to keep your data if powered off for an extended period of time, so I actually still do my backup on HDDs. Someone please correct me if this is wrong.

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

#199

Post by hinkley »

jeroenhd wrote: post #128
afavour wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in. And others who wish one single game didn't waste 130GB of their disk space, it's fine to ignore their opinions? They used up a ton more disk space to apply an ill-advised optimization that didn't have much effect. I don't really understand why you'd consider that a positive thing…

By their own industry data ( https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... ), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin. The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that t…

> 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.

That makes no goddamn sense. I’ve read it three times and to paraphrase Babbage, I cannot apprehend the confusion of thought that would lead to such a conclusion.

5x gets resources to investigate, not assumed to be correct and then doubled. Orders of magnitude change implementations, as we see here. And it sounds like they just manufactured one out of thin air.

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

#200

Post by hinkley »

jeroenhd wrote: post #122
account42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... > 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.

If I’m being charitable, I’m hoping that means the decision was made early in the development process when concrete numbers were not available. However the article linked above kinda says they assumed the problem would be twice as bad as the industry numbers and that’s… that’s not how these things work.

That’s the sort of mistake that leads to announcing a 4x reduction in install size.

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