- > 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 with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time.”
It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
I expect it's a story that'll never get told in enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly seems strange from the outside for this optimisation to be both possible and acceptable.
by fleabitdev
7 subcomments
- Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher.
In other words, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.
Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.
by canucker2016
4 subcomments
- Back in 2014, Titanfall's disk space was 75% UNCOMPRESSED audio (35GB of 48GB) for the gamers with only dual-core CPUs.
from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-...
“On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio.”
by geerlingguy
2 subcomments
- 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.
by rincebrain
2 subcomments
- 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 hash" option in the build, on a tree with copies of assets scattered everywhere, and it was just nobody had ever checked if the fear around the option was based on outcomes.
(I know they said in the original blog post that it was based around fears of client performance impact, but the whole reason I'm staring at that is that if it's just a deduplication table at storage time, the client shouldn't...care? It's not writing to the game data archives, it's just looking stuff up either way...)
by haritha-j
2 subcomments
- I recently downloaded Hunt showdown. I think it was around 70 gigs. About a month later, I had to update it. The download was the same size. I think they literally just overrode the entire game because they were too lazy to update it properly.
- 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.
- I did similar work on a game a long time ago and it took over a month to slim it down to 1/4 of the size but in this case 'at runtime' - the producer wasn't impressed. It looked exactly the same. I wonder if they had any pushback.
by unixnight
1 subcomments
- It was legit faster to delete and redownload this game than update it since steam considered my SSD too full (WITH 200 GIGS FREE) to download the files to said SSD, instead opting to use my SLOWEST HDD as the cache drive for the download.
It would then proceed to download the update in 5 minutes and spend 8 HOURS UPDATING.
A full download of the game? 10 minutes.
Glad to see this update. I hope more games follow suit
by easyThrowaway
2 subcomments
- Did the duplicated files were even used on pc? Like, do you even have such low access to the file system that you can deduce which duplicated instance has a faster access time on a mechanical hard drive?
by miladyincontrol
0 subcomment
- Great change, game is loading faster than ever least on ssds. Who knew letting the OS cache files rather than fail juggling several copies of the same data had benefits.
Curious some how it affected hdd users with ram in excess beyond the minimum.
- Nixxes has such a good reputation in my book that their name immediately removes any porting-fears when I see they are responsible for a release.
- if your game takes 154 GB of space, you should never be able to touch a computer ever again.
- > made possible with support from Nixxes Software, best known for developing high-quality PC ports of Sony’s biggest PlayStation titles
Now if only Nixxes would stop using Sony's stupid proprietary audio system in PC games, I'd be happy. Every Sony game causes my sound card to freak out and I lose the ability to control anything - even volume. My surround speakers stop working completely and I'm effectively forced into accepting mono audio.
- I just checked out this game on Steam and was pretty excited to buy it until I read that it requires a kernel-level anticheat which acts as a rootkit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard
Why on earth is any self-respecting person installing this on their machine?
by Artoooooor
2 subcomments
- 154GB? That's why I almost don't "buy" AAA games. This is much bigger cost than money for that game.
by l33tfr4gg3r
0 subcomment
- Warframe also did this relatively recently, though perhaps not quite as aggressive a reduction as Helldivers, but still.
https://www.pcgamer.com/call-of-duty-take-note-warframe-is-r...
by user____name
0 subcomment
- People still use HDDs in consumer PCs?
- > "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days"
Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it!
I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?
In particular I find the massive disparity between decently similar games interesting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes something like 130gb on my Xbox, whereas Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb. They have similar visual fidelity, I would say Robocop might have a little bit of a lead, but Indiana Jones has fancier dynamic lighting.
At 130gb though, I almost could have streamed my entire playthrough of the game at 4k and came out on top.
- 23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!
- 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.
- They had the size at 7x duplication to save load times for hdds? WTH
- On size limited platforms like steam deck and friends this is a huge W
- Devs went full fitgirl (repack site which reduces sizes of cracked releases significantly via similar approaches)
- This is yet another thing I’ve been saying is technically feasible in a large variety of games immediately since it started happening to game sizes around 2015.
I’ve had nothing except people screaming at me that I’m wrong and that this is just how modern games have to be. There’s always some gaslight argument about how I’m wrong and actually the devs are in fact geniuses because of some genius trick about a variety of systems significantly bloating the size.
Rather than try to look at the problem, I get continuously attacked with retconned reasons trying to justify every decision going into this bloat. This is exactly the same dev retcon trend train we saw with Cloud (“No, wrong, it’s not computers. It’s servers. Totally different. And it’s not even servers, it’s cloud.”) and MicroServices (“There’s literally no reason to ever not use microservices unless you’re a legacy dev. Especially on The Cloud, which is different and not comparable in any way to a a self hosted server.”)
I’m 3/3 so far. Waiting for you guys to still figure out leetcode and how this actually captures the inverse of the thing you’re trying to account for. But I already know you’re going to retcon that argument too and say ackshully leetcode DOES work to hire developers because we want to hire people who are wealthy enough to have time to memorize questions and answers. We always knew developers would have AI (lol) and this paper that retroactively applies a matching hypothesis that trends with leetcode is actually what smart developers like me knew all along.”
by CafeRacer
1 subcomments
- In other news - "Call of Duty installer now takes additional 131GB of space on the disk"
- I wonder if they will port this to PS5 as well. It would be wonderful to recover some space.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131518)
by marknutter
0 subcomment
- Now all they need to do is remove the kernel-level anti-cheat
- What if.. the management made a request to make the game take more space than the previous release?
So everyone could see just how much content there is and how much better everything is.
I mean, the developers cannot be that incompetent while being able to ship a high quality product.
by ChrisArchitect
1 subcomments
- [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131518
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