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

Solving the 100GB Game Download

venusoft.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 108 posts

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#91

Post by goosedragons »

MBCook wrote: post #41
NikolaNovak wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. 2.5 hours initial wait to then play a game normally is... fine. It's a non issue for most folks:) I noticed Battle.net from BLizzard tracks couple of thresholds in the progress bar - when the game will be fully downloaded, but also when the game is playable. For many updates, those two thresholds are very close together; but occasionally, the "playable" is half the distance or less of "completed", which makes…

PS5 has a similar system to let you start playing (properly designed) games before downloading is complete. I know iOS has something like that, though o don’t think I’ve ever seen it used. And I’d expect Xbox does as well, but I’m not in that ecosystem so I don’t know as much about their features.

Xbox does. I think it was there at the beginning of the Xbox One Gen?

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#92

Post by imtringued »

dangus wrote: post #64
sombragris wrote: post #63

I like it, but it does not "solve" the big downloads issue. You know what would solve the 100 GB game download problem? Reducing that to 30 or 40 GB, not inventing an (admittedly clever and nice) man in the middle streaming things to you in byte-sized chunks.

That ain’t happening, and I don’t want it to happen, personally. All that data represents visual fidelity. I don’t want the of type games that boast amazing graphics and endless content to get smaller and more crude. I think this product is actually a big dead end because all you need is fast Internet to make this whole thing obsolete. Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs, for the price of a typi…

>Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs, for the price of a typical AAA title you can get a 2TB pcie nvme tlc SSD.

As someone who bought such an SSD, I'm surprised that AAA titles cost more than 100€ nowadays.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#93

Post by imtringued »

eviks wrote: post #84
dangus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just doesn’t bother me. If a game wasted something like 500GB of storage space that means it’s temporarily borrowing $20 worth of SSD storage. (I think the uncompressed audio was usually because of CPU decoding restraints, and the fact that a typical PlayStation game had such a crazy amount of “free” storage to work with on a disc compared to the amount of data needed to create the game and its world - might as we…

you also forgot permanently spending $X worth of time and inconvenience getting that 500GB

When you realize NVMe turns your high performance 6 Gbps SATA ports off and you have to migrate 500GB of data from one SSD to another over 3gbps... and it gets slower once you consider that you as a software developer have millions of tiny files that take even longer to copy over. Oh yeah also your boot entry doesn't work so you have to fix that one up. Upgrading from 500GB to 2TB easily cost 4 hours plus letting it run overnight to avoid wasting time on the transfer.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#94

Post by imtringued »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3
monkeywork wrote: post #2

Not affiliated with this project but it looks to be incredibly cool - very small team. I hope this shows up as a Linux / Steamdeck option in the near future as well. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ TL;DW: Mounts a virtual filesystem that on-demands downloads game content to your local drive in the form of a cache. Start playing games instantly without downloading the entire game.

I am little skeptical since a game needs to load one file and then another file and then another file and this could add up to an awful lot of waiting in an uncontrolled manner. Although big downloads are slow in my rural area I feel included by them because I can play the game in the end whereas streaming is not a good option at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the demo didn't increase latency and only throttled the download speed.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#95

Post by nhinck »

justinclift wrote: post #90
pcchristie wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting, I didn't know many people got > 100mpbs without paying for the infra. I am going off the fact that (as you may have seen in the news) a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount (majority?) of consumers could possibly pay for that without realising they'd never get it. After that made the news I noticed much more prominent caveats on 100mbps tiers, and many te…

> a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount ... never get it. Ahhh, yeah. I'm with Launtel ( https://launtel.net.au ), who seem to be extremely technically clueful and the opposite of the shady places that are around (Dodo, etc). So I've been with them in Melb, Syd, and now Brisbane. Melb speed was 100/40, Syd was 50/20, and here is Bris currently on 400/50. At all locations,…

Have you played around with what region you're downloading from? You can change it manually and it may be worth checking out whether or not Sydney/Melbourne offer better download speeds than Brisbane.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#96

Post by justinclift »

nhinck wrote: post #95
justinclift wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount ... never get it. Ahhh, yeah. I'm with Launtel ( https://launtel.net.au ), who seem to be extremely technically clueful and the opposite of the shady places that are around (Dodo, etc). So I've been with them in Melb, Syd, and now Brisbane. Melb speed was 100/40, Syd was 50/20, and here is Bris currently on 400/50. At all locations,…

Have you played around with what region you're downloading from? You can change it manually and it may be worth checking out whether or not Sydney/Melbourne offer better download speeds than Brisbane.

I thought I'd tested that before and there wasn't a difference.

But testing again now - just in case I was misremembering - and Civ 6 is downloading from the Melb server at ~15MB/s currently.

Thanks for prompting me! :)

---

Testing the Sydney server now too, and that's ~20MB/s. Looks like a solid win there as well. :)

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#97

Post by nhinck »

justinclift wrote: post #96
nhinck wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you played around with what region you're downloading from? You can change it manually and it may be worth checking out whether or not Sydney/Melbourne offer better download speeds than Brisbane.

I thought I'd tested that before and there wasn't a difference. But testing again now - just in case I was misremembering - and Civ 6 is downloading from the Melb server at ~15MB/s currently. Thanks for prompting me! :) --- Testing the Sydney server now too, and that's ~20MB/s. Looks like a solid win there as well. :)

Well it's not what it could be at least it's better.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#98

Post by MBCook »

goosedragons wrote: post #91
MBCook wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS5 has a similar system to let you start playing (properly designed) games before downloading is complete. I know iOS has something like that, though o don’t think I’ve ever seen it used. And I’d expect Xbox does as well, but I’m not in that ecosystem so I don’t know as much about their features.

Xbox does. I think it was there at the beginning of the Xbox One Gen?

That’s what I thought I remembered hearing about.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#99

Post by sombragris »

dangus wrote: post #64
sombragris wrote: post #63

I like it, but it does not "solve" the big downloads issue. You know what would solve the 100 GB game download problem? Reducing that to 30 or 40 GB, not inventing an (admittedly clever and nice) man in the middle streaming things to you in byte-sized chunks.

That ain’t happening, and I don’t want it to happen, personally. All that data represents visual fidelity. I don’t want the of type games that boast amazing graphics and endless content to get smaller and more crude. I think this product is actually a big dead end because all you need is fast Internet to make this whole thing obsolete. Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs, for the price of a typi…

> Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs

Also stupidly difficult when you have a preconfigured device such as a laptop. I think anything that would require you to modify your equipment's hardware configuration is not much of an argument.

Re: Solving the 100GB Game Download

#100

Post by permo-w »

pierrefermat1 wrote: post #81
permo-w wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that the same "Office Click-to-Run" that I've had to disable running from start-up 15 times?

My god is that thing genuinely cancerous, the autoruns software helped me get rid of it for good

the real problem here isn't office ctr, it's the fact that there are 10 different ways to run a third-party program from start-up, many of which are not only opt-out but opt-out somewhere deep in the mysteries of the regisphere
Post reply on HN