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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

#271

Post by everdrive »

loeg wrote: post #236
everdrive wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you poweroff your backup HDDs for extended periods of time (months+)? That's a relatively infrequent backup interval. If not, the poweroff issue isn't relevant to you. (More relevant might be that backups are a largely sequential workload and HDDs are still marginally cheaper per TB than QLC flash.)

Yes, I try to backup once per month but I'm not always very regular about it. Multiple months are not uncommon for me.

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

#272

Post by bigyabai »

Lucasoato wrote: post #260
bigyabai wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, that explains how the R1Delta guys were able to cut the size on disk to less than 20gb! https://github.com/r1delta/r1delta

Love the deep and touching commit messages https://github.com/r1delta/r1delta/commit/f5c81bf92f9a8c99d9...

Grug is a real dev, those memes weren't merely joking.

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

#273

Post by Turskarama »

ffsm8 wrote: post #216
PunchyHamster wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They didn't actually fix this until a couple of months after they publicly revealed that this was the reason the game was so big and a lot of people pointed out how dumb it is. I saw quite a few comments saying that people put it on their storage HDD specifically because it was too big to fit on their SSD. Ironic. They could have got their own data quite a bit earlier during development, not nearly two years after release!

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

#274

Post by dragonmost »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #176
horsawlarway wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense. Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important". If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size,…

So guide me through this thought process: You are saying, that most users don't check install size of their games. Which I am not convinced of, but might even be true. Lets assume this to be true for the moment. How does this contradict, what I stated? How does users being uninformed or unaware of technical details make it so that suddenly cramming the user's disk is "caring" instead of "not caring"? To me this does…

It's not even about graphics it's about load time on HDD. Which turns out didn't benefit all that much. I can see customers being much more annoyed at a longer load time than a big install size as this has become pretty common.

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

#275

Post by creatonez »

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…

Eh? Hard drives for gaming and high-end workstations are thoroughly obsolete. SSDs are not optional when playing any triple-A game. It's kinda wild to see people still complaining about this.

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

#277

Post by creatonez »

everdrive wrote: post #198
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…

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.

A disk that is powered off is not holding your data, regardless of whether it is an HDD, SDD, or if it is in redundant RAID or not. Disks are fundamentally a disposable medium. If you don't have them powered on, you have no way to monitor for failures and replace a drive if something goes wrong - it will just disappear someday without you noticing.

Tape, M-DISC, microfilm, and etched quartz are the only modern mediums that are meant to be left in storage without needing to be babysit, in climate controlled warehousing at least.

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

#278

Post by ratelimitsteve »

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…

a one time cost of a big download is something customers have shown time and again that they're willing to bear. remember that software is optimized for ROI first and all other things second. Sometimes optimizing for ROI means "ship it today and let the first week of sales pay salaries while we fix it", sometimes ROI means picking between getting the file size down, getting that new feature out and fixing that game breaking edge case bug. Everything you do represents several things you choose not to do.

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

#279

Post by pixl97 »

Havoc wrote: post #270
pixl97 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may misunderstand how poor hdd IOPs are and how much latency 4k random reads induce. Random IO can be 100 to 200 times slower than sequential reads on small file workloads.

It literally says in the article the effect was inconsequential > 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.

In this workload, it happened to be, in a lot of workloads it is not at all. This is quite likely because over time media sizes have increased greatly. Microsoft research on operating systems shows that contiguous chunks at 64MB don't really show any IOPS penalty in practical usage scenarios.

I work on workloads that work with thousands to millions of small files. 1k to 1MB. I can promise you that the IO effect is massive, with shortcuts like working directly on archive files/zips where they are read and written at once saves massively on hardware costs as IOPS tend to be expensive. This is with fast NVMe disks, no spinning platters involved. Also small files massively increase write amplification on SSDs.

There probably is significant savings in deduping 'tiny' files, but the moment you get past a particular threshold it drops off, and the vast majority of game assets have increased over that size.

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

#280

Post by JohnBooty »

ethbr1 wrote: post #243
JohnBooty wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect better from HN, where most of us are engineers or engineer-adjacent. It's fair to question Arrowhead's priorities but... too lazy Really? I think the PC install size probably should have been addressed sooner too, but... which do you think is more likely? Arrowhead is a whole company full of "lazy" developers who just don't like to work very hard? Or do you think they had their hands full with other optimiza…

An 85% disk size reduction at minimal performance impact is negligent by the standard of professional excellence. But that's also par for the course with AA+ games these days, where shoving content into an engine is paramount and everything else is 'as long as it works.' Thanks, Bethesda. Evidenced by the litany of quality of life bug fixes and performance improvements modders hack into EOL games.

The only sane way to judge "professional excellence" would be holistically, not by asking "has this person or team ever shipped a bug?" If you disagree, then I hope you are judged the same way during your next review.

In the case of HD2 I'd say the team has done well enough. The game has maintained player base after nearly two years, including on PC. This is rare in the world of live service games, and we should ask ourselves what this tells us about the overall technical quality of the game - is the game so amazing that people keep playing despite abysmal technical quality?

The technical quality of the game itself has been somewhat inconsistent, but I put hundreds of hours into it (over 1K, I think) and most of the time it was trouble-free (and fun).

I would also note that the PC install size issue has only become egregious somewhat recently. The issue was always there, but initially the PC install size was small enough that it wasn't a major issue for most players. I actually never noticed the install size bug because I have a $75 1TB drive for games and even at its worst, HD2 consumed only a bit over 10% of that.

It certainly must have been challenging for the developers. There has been a constant stream of new content, and an entirely new platform (Xbox) added since release. Perhaps more frustratingly for the development team, there has also been a neverending parade of rebalancing work which has consumed a lot of cycles. Some of this rebalancing work was unavoidable (in a complex game, millions of players will find bugs and meta strategies that could never be uncovered by testing alone) and some was the result of perhaps-avoidable internal discord regarding the game's creative direction.

The game is also somewhat difficult to balance and test by design. There are 10 difficulty levels and 3 enemy factions. It's almost like 30 separate games. This is an excellent feature of the game, but it would be fair to Arrowhead for perhaps biting off more than any team can chew.

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