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> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard driv

by snet0 10mo ago

> 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.

jsheard 10mo ago
From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.
- Ekaros 10mo ago
  Also the cost is often offloaded to the "greedy" Valve... So there is less pressure to optimize their own CDN use.
  - jsheard 10mo ago
    Yeah, I don't think any of the stores charge developers in proportion to how much bandwidth they use. If that changed then the priorities could shift pretty quickly. Publishers do have to care somewhat on the Switch since Nintendo does charge them more for higher capacity physical carts, but a lot of the time they just sidestep that by only putting part (or none) of the game on the cart and requiring the player to download the rest.
    - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
      it's not really all that big of a cost, serving few hundred GBs costs pennies, despise what prices of S3 storage and bandwidth might led some people to believe.
- code_for_monkey 10mo ago
  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
  - snet0 10mo ago
    I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.
    - justsomehnguy 10mo ago
      It's amusing we had a 2x-10x compression and negligible perfomance hit on 486 with DBLSPACE yet in 2020+...
  - KeplerBoy 10mo ago
    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.
    - mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
      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.
      - KeplerBoy 10mo ago
        I guess it's a lock-in effect of sorts.
  - jsheard 10mo ago
    > I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs I looked up the size of the latest one, and Sony's investment in RAD Kraken seems to be paying dividends: Xbox: 214 GB PC: 162 GB PS5: 96 GB
- bombcar 10mo ago
  Given how many Steam games are bought but never even installed, it would seem not terribly worth optimizing for. On phone, I bet you see some more effort.
  - georgeecollins 10mo ago
    Both things are sort of true. Its not sales where size can hurt you but retention, which is why it tended to matter more on phones. When you need space on your device the apps are listed from largest to smallest. On both phones and PCs storage has just grown so its less of an issue. The one thing I have noticed is that Apple does its price windowing around memory so you pay an absurd amount for an extra 128 gb. The ultra competitive Chinese phone market crams high end phones with a ton of memory and battery. Si some popular Chinese phone games are huge compared to ones made for the iPhone.
- LtWorf 10mo ago
  It might but they have no way of measuring it so they won't take it into account.
PoignardAzur 10mo ago
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.
- bombcar 10mo ago
  This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > you could say preconceived just as easily Would have saved us from all the people who reject any sort of optimization work because for them it is always "too early" since some product team wanted their new feature in production yesterday, and users waiting 5 seconds for a page load isn't considered bad enough just yet.
    - Capricorn2481 10mo ago
      Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things." It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway." So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team would have given us, but more expensive.
      - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
        > It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway." the problem is that it doesn't say that directly so people without experience take it at face value.
        10mo ago
nerdjon 10mo ago
High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want. Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales. Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already. That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower. I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.
- onli 10mo ago
  That already happened :) Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. And I think I saw SSDs as requirement for a few other games now, in the requirement listings on steam.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. To be fair, at launch Starfield had pretty shit loading times even with blazing fast SSDs, and the game has a lot of loading screens, so makes sense they'll nip that one in the bud and just say it's unsupported with the slower type of disks.
- literallywho 10mo ago
  Latest Ratchet and Clank game relies heavily on ps5’s nvme drive. Its PC port states that SSD is required. And IIRC, the experience on mechanical drives is quite terrible to the unplayable level.
aeve890 10mo ago
>It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary! You should look at COD install sizes and almost weekly ridiculously huge "updates". 150gb for a first install is almost generous considering most AAA games.
deng 10mo ago
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...
- amlib 10mo ago
  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 files that won't care much for the speed loss. It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
  - deng 10mo ago
    > It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games. Yes, because they apparently still duplicate data so that the terrible IOPS of spinning disks does not factor as much. You people need to stop with this so that we can all have smaller games again! ;-) <--- (IT'S A JOKE)
  - Pet_Ant 10mo ago
    I install all my games on HDD but then use PrimoCache for RAM https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/ https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/
    - jquery 10mo ago
      PrimoCache is awesome, highly recommended. I’d only say to make sure your computer is rock stable before installing it, in my limited experience it exponentially increases the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer is unstable.
- robin_reala 10mo ago
  Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.
afavour 10mo ago
> 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 hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.
- jeroenhd 10mo ago
  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 consumer SSD). If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in.
  - nearbuy 10mo ago
    According to the post, "the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most." It didn't help their game load noticeably faster. They just hadn't checked if the optimization actually helped.
    - jeroenhd 10mo ago
      The actual source (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/491583942944621371 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...) says: > Only a few seconds difference? > Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns. > Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, 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. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs. They measured first, accepted the minimal impact, and then changed their game.
jeffwask 10mo ago
Game companies these days barely optimize engine graphical performance before release never mind the package size or patching speed. They just stamp higher minimum system requirements on the package.
- seivan 10mo ago
  [dead]
clusterhacks 10mo ago
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.
- mikepurvis 10mo ago
  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.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  It's because patting yourself on the back for getting 5x performance increase in microbenchmark feels good and looks good on yearly review. > 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. Misaligned budgeting and goals is bane of good engineering. I've seen some absolutely stupid stuff like outsourcing hosting a simple site to us, because client would rather hire 3rd party to buy domain and put a simple site there (some advertising), than to deal with their own security guys and host it on their own infrastructure. "It's a cost center" "So is fucking HR, why you don't fire them ?" "Uh, I'll ignore that, pls just invoice anything you do to other teams" ... "Hey, they bought cloud solution that doesn't work/they can't figure it out, can you help them" "But we HAVE stuff doing that cheaper and easier, why they didn't come to us" "Oh they thought cloud will be cheaper and just work after 5 min setup"
root_axis 10mo ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good. I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some games where neither graphics fidelity or frame rate was a priority (one of the recent Pokemon games... which is really disappointing for one of the biggest multimedia franchises of all time).
  - Narishma 10mo ago
    That used to be the case, but this current generation the vast majority of games have a 60 fps performance mode. On PS5 at least, I can't speak about other consoles.
bee_rider 10mo ago
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…
londons_explore 10mo ago
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.
- neuroelectron 10mo ago
  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.
NBJack 10mo ago
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.
- mikepurvis 10mo ago
  Noting in particular that the PS5's internal storage isn't just "an ssd", it's a gen 4 drive that can sequential-read at up to 5500 MB/s. By comparison a SATA III port caps out at 6Gbps (750 MB/s), and first generation NVMe drives ("gen 3") were limited to 3500 MB/s.
  - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    the speed is one thing but seek times are just orders of magnitude different too. SSD on SATA is still "not bad" for most games, but HDD can be awful if game does not do much sequential
    - mikepurvis 10mo ago
      My understanding is that optimizing for sequential read is a big reason for historical game install bloat; if you include the common assets multiple times in the archive, then loading a level/zone becomes one big continuous slurp rather than jumping all over the place to pick up the stuff that's common to everything. Obviously this didn't matter with optical media where the user wasn't impacted, but it's annoying on PC where we've had a long period of users who invested in expensive, high-performance storage having to use more of it than needed due to optimizations geared at legacy players still on spinning rust. I expect that low-latency seek time is also pretty key to making stuff like nanite work, where all the LODs for a single object are mixed together and you need to be able to quickly pick off the disk the parts that are needed for the current draw task.
- shantara 10mo ago
kasabali 10mo ago
You missed the most bizarre quote: > These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns Unfortunately it's not only game development, all modern society seems operate like this.
whalesalad 10mo ago
> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost Wait till you find out what engine this game is made in. https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-ii-was-built-on-an-archaic-engine-that-you-can-t-access-anymore https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-ii-was-built-on-an-archaic...
behringer 10mo ago
I think smaller game sizes would hurt sales. Your first though on a 23gb game when other games are 100 plus is, why is there so little content?
jjk166 10mo ago
I'd bet any amount of money a demo ran slow on one stakeholder's computer, who happened to have a mechanical hard drive, they attributed the slowness to the hard drive without a real investigation and optimizing for mechanical hard drive performance became standard practice. The demo may not have even been for this game, just a case of once bitten twice shy.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
it's not cost to them. The cost is paid by consumers and platforms. Also if goal was to improve things for small minority they could've just pawned it off to free DLC, like how some games do with 4k texture packs
- oreally 10mo ago
  It would be ironic if incidents like this made Valve start charging companies for large file sizes of their games. It would go to show that good things get abused to no end if limits aren't set.
JohnBooty 10mo ago
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. From a technical perspective, the key thing to know is that the console install size for HD2 was always that small -- their build process assumed SSD on console so it didn't duplicate stuff. 154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :) How did it get so bad on PC? Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly. This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid
pdntspa 10mo ago
I have heard that in many scenarios it is faster to load uncompressed assets directly rather than load+decompress. Load time is prioritized over hard drive space so you end up with the current situation.
- tehjoker 10mo ago
  You need very fast decompression for that to work these days when io speeds are so high, and decompression takes compute that is being used for game logic. Very fast decompression often means low compression or multicore. I have seen libjpgturbo vastly outperform raw disk reads though
- mrguyorama 10mo ago
  There have been plenty of times where the opposite is true: Storing highly compressed data and decompressing it in RAM is much faster than loading uncompressed assets. Which is the primary problem: Computers are so varied and so ever changing that if you are optimizing without hard data from your target hardware, you aren't optimizing, you are just doing random shit. Add to that, game devs sometimes are just dumb. Titanfall 1 came with tens of gigabytes of uncompressed audio, for "performance", which is horse shit. Also turns out they might have been lying entirely. Titanfall 1 was made on the source engine, which does not support the OGG audio format their audio files were in. So they decompressed them at install time. They could have just used a different audio file format.
hinkley 10mo ago
It’s the same sort of apathy/arrogance that made new Windows versions run like dogshit on old machines. Gates really should have had stock in PC makers. He sold enough of them. I don’t think it’s always still the case but for more than ten years every release of OSX ran better on old hardware, not worse. Some people think the problem was MS investing too eagerly into upgrading developer machines routinely, giving them a false sense of what “fast enough” looked like. But the public rhetoric was so dismissive that I find that pretty unlikely. They just didn’t care. Institutionally. I’m not really into the idea of Helldivers in the first place but I’m not going to install a 150GB game this side of 2040. That’s just fucking stupid.
deleted 10mo ago
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XorNot 10mo ago
All of that takes time.abd you never have enough time. At any given point if it wasn't vital to shipping and not immediately breaking, then it can be backburnered. Messing with asset loading is probably a sure fire way to risk bugs and crashes - so I suspect this mostly was waiting on proving the change didn't break everything (and Helldiver's has had a lot of seemingly small changes break other random things).
ratelimitsteve 10mo ago
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.

by snet0 10mo ago

jsheard 10mo ago

From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.

Ekaros 10mo ago
Also the cost is often offloaded to the "greedy" Valve... So there is less pressure to optimize their own CDN use.
- jsheard 10mo ago
  Yeah, I don't think any of the stores charge developers in proportion to how much bandwidth they use. If that changed then the priorities could shift pretty quickly. Publishers do have to care somewhat on the Switch since Nintendo does charge them more for higher capacity physical carts, but a lot of the time they just sidestep that by only putting part (or none) of the game on the cart and requiring the player to download the rest.
  - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    it's not really all that big of a cost, serving few hundred GBs costs pennies, despise what prices of S3 storage and bandwidth might led some people to believe.
code_for_monkey 10mo ago
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
- snet0 10mo ago
  I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.
  - justsomehnguy 10mo ago
    It's amusing we had a 2x-10x compression and negligible perfomance hit on 486 with DBLSPACE yet in 2020+...
- KeplerBoy 10mo ago
  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.
  - mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
    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.
    - KeplerBoy 10mo ago
      I guess it's a lock-in effect of sorts.
- jsheard 10mo ago
  > I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs I looked up the size of the latest one, and Sony's investment in RAD Kraken seems to be paying dividends: Xbox: 214 GB PC: 162 GB PS5: 96 GB
bombcar 10mo ago
Given how many Steam games are bought but never even installed, it would seem not terribly worth optimizing for. On phone, I bet you see some more effort.
- georgeecollins 10mo ago
  Both things are sort of true. Its not sales where size can hurt you but retention, which is why it tended to matter more on phones. When you need space on your device the apps are listed from largest to smallest. On both phones and PCs storage has just grown so its less of an issue. The one thing I have noticed is that Apple does its price windowing around memory so you pay an absurd amount for an extra 128 gb. The ultra competitive Chinese phone market crams high end phones with a ton of memory and battery. Si some popular Chinese phone games are huge compared to ones made for the iPhone.
LtWorf 10mo ago
It might but they have no way of measuring it so they won't take it into account.

PoignardAzur 10mo ago

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.

bombcar 10mo ago
This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > you could say preconceived just as easily Would have saved us from all the people who reject any sort of optimization work because for them it is always "too early" since some product team wanted their new feature in production yesterday, and users waiting 5 seconds for a page load isn't considered bad enough just yet.
  - Capricorn2481 10mo ago
    Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things." It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway." So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team would have given us, but more expensive.
    - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
      > It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway." the problem is that it doesn't say that directly so people without experience take it at face value.
      - 10mo ago

nerdjon 10mo ago

High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want. Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales. Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already. That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower. I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.

onli 10mo ago
That already happened :) Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. And I think I saw SSDs as requirement for a few other games now, in the requirement listings on steam.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. To be fair, at launch Starfield had pretty shit loading times even with blazing fast SSDs, and the game has a lot of loading screens, so makes sense they'll nip that one in the bud and just say it's unsupported with the slower type of disks.
literallywho 10mo ago
Latest Ratchet and Clank game relies heavily on ps5’s nvme drive. Its PC port states that SSD is required. And IIRC, the experience on mechanical drives is quite terrible to the unplayable level.

aeve890 10mo ago

>It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary! You should look at COD install sizes and almost weekly ridiculously huge "updates". 150gb for a first install is almost generous considering most AAA games.

deng 10mo ago

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...

amlib 10mo ago
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 files that won't care much for the speed loss. It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
- deng 10mo ago
  > It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games. Yes, because they apparently still duplicate data so that the terrible IOPS of spinning disks does not factor as much. You people need to stop with this so that we can all have smaller games again! ;-) <--- (IT'S A JOKE)
- Pet_Ant 10mo ago
  I install all my games on HDD but then use PrimoCache for RAM https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/ https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/
  - jquery 10mo ago
    PrimoCache is awesome, highly recommended. I’d only say to make sure your computer is rock stable before installing it, in my limited experience it exponentially increases the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer is unstable.
robin_reala 10mo ago
Presumably only 11% of PC players, approximately 100% of console players will be on SSD.

afavour 10mo ago

> 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 hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.

jeroenhd 10mo ago
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 consumer SSD). If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in.
- nearbuy 10mo ago
  According to the post, "the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most." It didn't help their game load noticeably faster. They just hadn't checked if the optimization actually helped.
  - jeroenhd 10mo ago
    The actual source (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/491583942944621371 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...) says: > Only a few seconds difference? > Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns. > Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, 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. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs. They measured first, accepted the minimal impact, and then changed their game.

jeffwask 10mo ago

Game companies these days barely optimize engine graphical performance before release never mind the package size or patching speed. They just stamp higher minimum system requirements on the package.

seivan 10mo ago
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clusterhacks 10mo ago

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.

mikepurvis 10mo ago
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.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
It's because patting yourself on the back for getting 5x performance increase in microbenchmark feels good and looks good on yearly review. > 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. Misaligned budgeting and goals is bane of good engineering. I've seen some absolutely stupid stuff like outsourcing hosting a simple site to us, because client would rather hire 3rd party to buy domain and put a simple site there (some advertising), than to deal with their own security guys and host it on their own infrastructure. "It's a cost center" "So is fucking HR, why you don't fire them ?" "Uh, I'll ignore that, pls just invoice anything you do to other teams" ... "Hey, they bought cloud solution that doesn't work/they can't figure it out, can you help them" "But we HAVE stuff doing that cheaper and easier, why they didn't come to us" "Oh they thought cloud will be cheaper and just work after 5 min setup"

root_axis 10mo ago

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.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good. I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some games where neither graphics fidelity or frame rate was a priority (one of the recent Pokemon games... which is really disappointing for one of the biggest multimedia franchises of all time).
- Narishma 10mo ago
  That used to be the case, but this current generation the vast majority of games have a 60 fps performance mode. On PS5 at least, I can't speak about other consoles.

bee_rider 10mo ago

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…

londons_explore 10mo ago

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.

neuroelectron 10mo ago
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.

NBJack 10mo ago

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.

mikepurvis 10mo ago
Noting in particular that the PS5's internal storage isn't just "an ssd", it's a gen 4 drive that can sequential-read at up to 5500 MB/s. By comparison a SATA III port caps out at 6Gbps (750 MB/s), and first generation NVMe drives ("gen 3") were limited to 3500 MB/s.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  the speed is one thing but seek times are just orders of magnitude different too. SSD on SATA is still "not bad" for most games, but HDD can be awful if game does not do much sequential
  - mikepurvis 10mo ago
    My understanding is that optimizing for sequential read is a big reason for historical game install bloat; if you include the common assets multiple times in the archive, then loading a level/zone becomes one big continuous slurp rather than jumping all over the place to pick up the stuff that's common to everything. Obviously this didn't matter with optical media where the user wasn't impacted, but it's annoying on PC where we've had a long period of users who invested in expensive, high-performance storage having to use more of it than needed due to optimizations geared at legacy players still on spinning rust. I expect that low-latency seek time is also pretty key to making stuff like nanite work, where all the LODs for a single object are mixed together and you need to be able to quickly pick off the disk the parts that are needed for the current draw task.
shantara 10mo ago

kasabali 10mo ago

You missed the most bizarre quote: > These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns Unfortunately it's not only game development, all modern society seems operate like this.

whalesalad 10mo ago

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost Wait till you find out what engine this game is made in. https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-ii-was-built-on-an-archaic-engine-that-you-can-t-access-anymore https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-ii-was-built-on-an-archaic...

behringer 10mo ago

I think smaller game sizes would hurt sales. Your first though on a 23gb game when other games are 100 plus is, why is there so little content?

jjk166 10mo ago

I'd bet any amount of money a demo ran slow on one stakeholder's computer, who happened to have a mechanical hard drive, they attributed the slowness to the hard drive without a real investigation and optimizing for mechanical hard drive performance became standard practice. The demo may not have even been for this game, just a case of once bitten twice shy.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

it's not cost to them. The cost is paid by consumers and platforms. Also if goal was to improve things for small minority they could've just pawned it off to free DLC, like how some games do with 4k texture packs

oreally 10mo ago
It would be ironic if incidents like this made Valve start charging companies for large file sizes of their games. It would go to show that good things get abused to no end if limits aren't set.

JohnBooty 10mo ago

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. From a technical perspective, the key thing to know is that the console install size for HD2 was always that small -- their build process assumed SSD on console so it didn't duplicate stuff. 154GB was the product of massive asset duplication, as opposed 23GB being the product of an optimization miracle. :) How did it get so bad on PC? Well, it wasn't always so crazy. I remember it being reasonable closer to launch (almost 2 years ago) and more like ~40-60GB. Since then, the devs have been busy. There has been a LOT of reworking and a lot of new content, and the PC install size grew gradually rather than suddenly. This was probably impacted to some extent by the discontinued game engine they're using. Bitsquid/Stingray was discontinued partway through HD2 development and they continued on with it rather than restarting production entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquid

pdntspa 10mo ago

I have heard that in many scenarios it is faster to load uncompressed assets directly rather than load+decompress. Load time is prioritized over hard drive space so you end up with the current situation.

tehjoker 10mo ago
You need very fast decompression for that to work these days when io speeds are so high, and decompression takes compute that is being used for game logic. Very fast decompression often means low compression or multicore. I have seen libjpgturbo vastly outperform raw disk reads though
mrguyorama 10mo ago
There have been plenty of times where the opposite is true: Storing highly compressed data and decompressing it in RAM is much faster than loading uncompressed assets. Which is the primary problem: Computers are so varied and so ever changing that if you are optimizing without hard data from your target hardware, you aren't optimizing, you are just doing random shit. Add to that, game devs sometimes are just dumb. Titanfall 1 came with tens of gigabytes of uncompressed audio, for "performance", which is horse shit. Also turns out they might have been lying entirely. Titanfall 1 was made on the source engine, which does not support the OGG audio format their audio files were in. So they decompressed them at install time. They could have just used a different audio file format.

hinkley 10mo ago

It’s the same sort of apathy/arrogance that made new Windows versions run like dogshit on old machines. Gates really should have had stock in PC makers. He sold enough of them. I don’t think it’s always still the case but for more than ten years every release of OSX ran better on old hardware, not worse. Some people think the problem was MS investing too eagerly into upgrading developer machines routinely, giving them a false sense of what “fast enough” looked like. But the public rhetoric was so dismissive that I find that pretty unlikely. They just didn’t care. Institutionally. I’m not really into the idea of Helldivers in the first place but I’m not going to install a 150GB game this side of 2040. That’s just fucking stupid.

deleted 10mo ago

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XorNot 10mo ago

All of that takes time.abd you never have enough time. At any given point if it wasn't vital to shipping and not immediately breaking, then it can be backburnered. Messing with asset loading is probably a sure fire way to risk bugs and crashes - so I suspect this mostly was waiting on proving the change didn't break everything (and Helldiver's has had a lot of seemingly small changes break other random things).

ratelimitsteve 10mo ago

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.