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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

#211

Post by WreckVenom »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #113
WreckVenom wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 down…

Because all of these suggestions require developer resources. Doing a quick web search it is estimated they have ~150 employees. A lot of triple-A studios have thousands or ten of thousands of employees. So they are relatively small game studio.

Also note that they are adding more game modes, mode warbonds, and the game is multi-platform and multiplayer. The dev team is relatively small compared to other game studios.

The game engine the game is built in is discontinued and I believe is unsupported. IIRC they are rewriting the game in UE5 because of the issues with the unsupported engine.

A lot of people have problems with Arrowhead (there been some drama between Arrowhead and the community). The install size of the game while a problem wasn't like the top problem. Bigger issues in my mind as someone that plays the game regular is:

e.g.

- The newest updates to the game with some of new enemy types which are quite unfair to fight against IMO (Dragon Roach and the War Strider).

- The other complaint was performance/stability of the game was causing issues with streamers PCs. Some people claimed the game was breaking their PCs (I think this was BS and their PCs were just broken anyway). However there was a problem with performance in the game, which was resolved with a patch a few weeks ago. That greatly improved the game IMO.

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

#212

Post by the_af »

JohnBooty wrote: post #208
the_af wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go figure: people are downvoting me but I never once said developers must be stupid or lazy. This is a very common kind of mistake developers often make: premature optimization without considering the actual bottlenecks, and without testing theoretical optimizations actually make any difference. I know I'm guilty of this! I never called anyone lazy or stupid, I just wondered whether they blindly trusted some stats wi…

premature optimization One of those absolutely true statements that can obscure a bigger reality. It's certainly true that a lot of optimization can and should be done after a software project is largely complete. You can see where the hotspots are, optimize the most common SQL queries, whatever. This is especially true for CRUD apps where you're not even really making fundamental architecture decisions at all, becau…

> One of those absolutely true statements that can obscure a bigger reality.

To be clear, I'm not misquoting Knuth if that's what you mean. I'm arguing that in this case, specifically, this optimization was premature, as evidenced by the fact it didn't really have an impact (they explain other processes that run in parallel dominated the load times) and it caused trouble down the line.

> Some of those decisions don't pan out.

Indeed, some premature optimizations will and some won't. I'm not arguing otherwise! In this case, it was a bad call. It happens to all of us.

> I don't see a reason to think this. What are you thinking?

You're right, I got this backwards. While the time savings would have been minimal, the data duplication wasn't that big so the cost (for something that didn't pan out) wasn't that bad either.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

loeg wrote: post #170
clusterhacks wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In an online services company, a perf team can be net profitable rather than a "cost center." The one at my work routinely finds quantifiable savings that more than justify their cost. There will be huge mistakes occasionally, but mostly it is death by a thousand cuts -- it's easy to commit a 0.1% regression here or there, and there are hundreds of other engineers per performance engineer. Clawing back those 0.1% los…

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by hinkley »

JohnBooty wrote: post #210
hinkley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a working software developer, and if they prove they cannot do better, I get people who make statements like GP quoted demoted from the decision making process because they aren’t trustworthy and they’re embarrassing the entire team with their lack of critical thinking skills. When the documented worst case is 5x you prepare for the potential bad news that you will hit 2.5x to 5x in your own code. Not assume it w…

Well, then I'd like to work where you work. Hard to find shops that take performance seriously. You hiring? In my experience it's always been quite a battle to spend time on perf. I'll happily take a demotion if I make a 10x performance goof like that. As long as I can get promoted eventually if I make enough 10x wins.

I would classify my work as “shouting into the tempest” about 70% of the time.

People are more likely to thank me after the fact than cheer me on. My point, if I have one, is that gaming has generally been better about this but I don’t really want to work on games. Not the way the industry is. But since we are in fact discussing a game, I’m doing a lot of head scratching on this one.

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

#215

Post by canucker2016 »

Back in 2014, Titanfall's disk space was 75% UNCOMPRESSED audio (35GB of 48GB) for the gamers with only dual-core CPUs.

from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-...

  “On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio.”

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

#216

Post by ffsm8 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #137
jeroenhd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instead of y'know, running their own game on a hdd. It's literally "instead of profiling our own app we profiled competition's app and made decisions based on that".

They started off with the competitors data, and then moved on once they had their own data though? Not sure what y'all complaining about.

They made an effort to improve the product, but because everything in tech comes with side effects it turned out to be a bad decision which they rolled back. Sounds like highly professional behavior to me by people doing their best. Not everything will always work out, 100% of the time.

And this might finally reverse the trend of games being >100gb as other teams will be able to point to this decision why they shouldn't implement this particular optimization prematurely

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

#217

Post by KomoD »

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.

This is why I stopped playing COD Warzone, every time I wanted to play I had to download the entire game again just because of some small update.

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

#218

Post by superxpro12 »

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…

Good luck convincing the MBA's with spreadsheets that 'software quality' is of any value whatsoever.

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

#219

Post by superxpro12 »

canucker2016 wrote: post #215

Back in 2014, Titanfall's disk space was 75% UNCOMPRESSED audio (35GB of 48GB) for the gamers with only dual-core CPUs. from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-... “On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio.”

Isn't COD infamous for uncompressed assets as well, or am I misremembering?

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

#220

Post by superxpro12 »

miohtama wrote: post #38

AFAIK Helldivers 2 runs some really old engine which was discontinued many years ago. Not "state of the art." It's also a title that shows you can have a really good game without the latest tech.

If im remembering correctly, I think its a variant of the engine that vermintide and darktide use, some old autodesk-acquired engine. Given the successes of vermintide and darktide, the engine still has plenty of legs left.
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