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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

#81

Post by mikepurvis »

clusterhacks wrote: post #63
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…

That sounds like fascinating work, but also kind of a case study in what a manager's role is to "clear the road" and handle the lion's share of that internal advocacy and politicking so that ICs don't have to deal with it.

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

#82

Post by everforward »

eska wrote: post #23
rincebrain wrote: post #7

I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here. Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around... The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by has…

HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs. Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully util…

The game installer can't control the layout on an HDD without doing some very questionable things like defragging and moving existing user files around the disk. It probably _could_ but the risk of irrecoverable user data loss or accidentally corrupting a boot partition via a bug would make it completely not worth it.

Even if you pack those, there's no guarantee they don't get fragmented by the filesystem.

CDs are different not because of media, but because of who owns the storage media layout.

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

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

bombcar wrote: post #35
PoignardAzur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find it surprising at all. A ton of developers do optimizations based on vibes and very rarely check if they're actually getting a real benefit from it.

This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.

Counterpoint: data driven development often leads to optimizations like this not being made because they're not the ones who are affected, their customers are. And software market is weird this way - little barriers to entry, yet almost nothing is a commodity, so there's no competitive pressure to help here either.

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

#85

Post by thatguy0900 »

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.

You can, but on the other hand they've been battling bugs from it with every release. The game is notorious for breaking things constantly. I played for quite a while and the sound engine was always awful with things not in your line of sight frequently not making any noise at all, and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns badgering the devs to notice and fix it. Very fun game still but if they had started with a supported engine a lot of stuff would probably work way better

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

#86

Post by phatfish »

embedding-shape wrote: post #53
tehbeard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not which duplicated instance.... Think of it as I have two packs for levels. Creek.level and roboplanet.level Both use the cyborg enemies, by duplicating the cyborg enemy model and texture data across both files, Only the level file needs to be opened to get all nessecary data for a match. Because modern OS will allow you to preallocate contiguous segments and have auto defrag, you can have it read this level f…

> As to why they had a HDD optimisation in 2024... Shrugs Sadly, Valve doesn't include/publish HDD vs SSD in/on their surveys ( https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=combined ) but considering the most popular combo seems to be 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz CPU frequency, I'm getting the impression that the average gaming PC machine isn't actually that beefy. If someone told me the most common s…

Steam has so many users I'm not sure the average says a lot? If you are just playing Hentai games like most Steam users (j/k, probably) you can do that on any device from the last 10 years.

More interesting would be to see the specs for users who bought COD (add other popular franchises as you wish) in the last 2 years. That would at least trim the sample set to those who expect to play recent graphics heavy titles.

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

#87

Post by vardump »

robin_reala wrote: post #57
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...

Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.

Rather 89% PC players have an SSD. For the console players much less. People (read: hordes of kids) are still using PS3, PS4, etc.

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

#88

Post by neuroelectron »

londons_explore wrote: post #67
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.

They say some kind of physical limit, but I think it's really market manipulation in order to bring about the cloud and centralization, control.

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

#89

Post by dotwaffle »

fleabitdev wrote: post #51
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/

In this case, the bug was 131 GB of wasted disk space after installation. Because the waste came from duplicate files, it should have had little impact on download size (unless there's a separate bug in the installer...) This is why the cost of the bug was so easy for the studio to ignore. An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years, so they might ha…

> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years

Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.

It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P

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