I bet this was a checkbox in the Autodesk Stingray engine, and they didn't have the expertise on hand to unfuck the game files when they unchecked it. Looks like it was easier than expected with a couple greybeards consulting. Awesome win for everyone involved.
Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
221–230 of 297 posts
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#222Earlier 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…
It is a trade-off. The game was developed on a discontinued engine, the game has had numerous problems with balance, performance and generally there were IMO far more important bugs. Super Helldive difficulty wasn't available because of performance issues. I've racked up 700 hours in the game and the storage requirements I didn't care about.
Oh wow, what is the story with the engine?
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#223I wonder if they will port this to PS5 as well. It would be wonderful to recover some space.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a trade-off. The game was developed on a discontinued engine, the game has had numerous problems with balance, performance and generally there were IMO far more important bugs. Super Helldive difficulty wasn't available because of performance issues. I've racked up 700 hours in the game and the storage requirements I didn't care about.
Oh wow, what is the story with the engine?
somehow they chose to build their very complicated live service game with the Autodesk Stingray engine which was discontinued in 2018! Helldivers 2 was released in 2024.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#225Earlier 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…
> The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs.
Maybe, kinda, sorta, on some games, on some spinning rust hard disks, if you held your hand just right and the Moon was real close to the cusp.
If you're still using spinning rust in a PC that you attempt to run modern software on, please drop me a message. I'll send you a tenner so you can buy yourself an SSD.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#226> 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…
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Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#227Earlier 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…
> The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. Maybe, kinda, sorta, on some games, on some spinning rust hard disks, if you held your hand just right and the Moon was real close to the cusp. If you're still using spinning rust in a PC that you attempt to run modern software on, please drop me a message. I'll send you a tenner so you can buy yourself an SSD…
The minimum requirement for new games is a SSD true.
However a lot of people have TINY SSDs. Think 500 gigabyte.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#228Earlier 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…
It's not a "feature" for the 89% of users whose SSD capacity was being wasted.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow, what is the story with the engine?
somehow they chose to build their very complicated live service game with the Autodesk Stingray engine which was discontinued in 2018! Helldivers 2 was released in 2024. https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview
That's really strange. Perhaps they had a set of engineers that knew it very well or had built an engine in it for another game. Still... strange.
Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow, what is the story with the engine?
somehow they chose to build their very complicated live service game with the Autodesk Stingray engine which was discontinued in 2018! Helldivers 2 was released in 2024. https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview
Development of HellDivers 2 started in 2016. So they would have been 2 years into development with that engine. So they would have had to effectively start again in another engine.