Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 297 posts

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

#61

Post by Pet_Ant »

amlib wrote: post #40
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...

Even though I have two SSDs in my main machine I still use a hard drive as an overflow for games that I judge are not SSD worthy. Because it's a recent 20TB HDD the read speeds approach 250MB/s and I've also specifically partitioned it at the beginning of the disk just for games so that it can sustain full transfer speeds without files falling into the slower tracks, the rest of the disk is then partitioned for media…

I install all my games on HDD but then use PrimoCache for RAM

https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

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

#63

Post by clusterhacks »

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 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.

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

#64

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #27
code_for_monkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs

Having a humongous game might be a competitive advantage in the era of live-service games. Users might be more hesitant to switch to another game if it means uninstalling yours and reinstalling is a big pain in the backside due to long download times.

More likely once they uninstall it, they never reinstall it because they'd have to clear out so much other stuff to fit it back in.

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

#65

Post by root_axis »

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…

Optimizing for disk space is very low on the priority list for pretty much every game, and this makes sense since its very low on the list of customer concerns relative to things like in-game performance, net code, tweaking game mechanics and balancing etc.

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

#66

Post by bee_rider »

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…

IIRC this has been the “done thing” forever. I’m not in game development, but I think I recall hearing about it in the Xbox 360 era. Conventional options are picked by default, benchmarks are needed to overturn that. Looking at my hard drive, massive game installations are still very much the industry standard…

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

#67

Post by londons_explore »

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…

Twenty years ago I bought a 1TB harddrive... It wasn't very expensive either.

Twenty years on, and somehow that's still 'big'.

Computing progress disappoints me.

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

#68

Post by KeplerBoy »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #64
KeplerBoy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a humongous game might be a competitive advantage in the era of live-service games. Users might be more hesitant to switch to another game if it means uninstalling yours and reinstalling is a big pain in the backside due to long download times.

More likely once they uninstall it, they never reinstall it because they'd have to clear out so much other stuff to fit it back in.

I guess it's a lock-in effect of sorts.

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

#69

Post by NBJack »

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…

The game is released on both PC and PS5, the latter of which was designed (and marketed) to take advantage of SSD speeds for streaming game content near real time.

The latest Ratchet and Clank, the poster child used in part to advertise the SSD speed advantage, suffers on traditional hard drives as well in the PC port. Returnal is in the same boat. Both were originally PS5 exclusives.

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

#70

Post by perching_aix »

geerlingguy wrote: post #15

Possibly a similar process to when you go into an AWS account, and find dozens of orphaned VMs, a few thousand orphaned disk volumes, etc., saving like $10k/month just deleting unused resources.

It's not a case of forgotten data, it's duplicated for access time reasons, like with optical media.

It follows in the footsteps of trading in storage for less compute and/or better performance.

An opposite approach in the form of a mod for Monster Hunter: Wilds recently made it possible [0] for end-users to decompress all the game textures ahead of time. This was beneficial there, because GPU decompression was causing stalls, and the trading in of compute for less storage resulted in significantly worse performance.

[0] https://youtu.be/AOxLV2US4Ac

Post reply on HN