Not what happened. They removed an optimization that in *some other games* ,that are not their game, gave 5x speed boost.
And they are changing it now coz it turned out all of that was bogus, the speed boost wasn't as high for loading of data itself, and good part of the loading of the level wasn't even waiting for disk, but terrain generation.
I’ve worked with far too many people who have done the equivalent in non game software and it leads to unhappy customers and salespeople. I’ve come to think of it as a kind of learned helplessness.
And others who wish one single game didn't waste 130GB of their disk space, it's fine to ignore their opinions?
They used up a ton more disk space to apply an ill-advised optimization that didn't have much effect. I don't really understand why you'd consider that a positive thing.
The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that they were simply too lazy to ever run fdupes over their install directory, which is simply not the case. The duplication was intentional, and is still intentional in many other games that could but likely won't apply the same data minimization.
I'll gladly take this update because considerable effort was spent on measuring the impact, but not one of those "everyone around me is so lazy, I'll just be the noble hero to sacrifice my time to deduplicate the game files" updates.
too lazy
Arrowhead is a whole company full of "lazy" developers who just don't like to work very hard?
Or do you think they had their hands full with other optimizations, bug fixes, and a large amount of new content while running a complex multiplatform live service game for millions of players? (Also consider that management was probably deciding priorities there and not the developers)
I put hundreds of hours into HD2 and had a tremendous amount of fun. It's not the product of "lazy" people...
But that's also par for the course with AA+ games these days, where shoving content into an engine is paramount and everything else is 'as long as it works.' Thanks, Bethesda.
Evidenced by the litany of quality of life bug fixes and performance improvements modders hack into EOL games.
In the case of HD2 I'd say the team has done well enough. The game has maintained player base after nearly two years, including on PC. This is rare in the world of live service games, and we should ask ourselves what this tells us about the overall technical quality of the game - is the game so amazing that people keep playing despite abysmal technical quality?
The technical quality of the game itself has been somewhat inconsistent, but I put hundreds of hours into it (over 1K, I think) and most of the time it was trouble-free (and fun).
I would also note that the PC install size issue has only become egregious somewhat recently. The issue was always there, but initially the PC install size was small enough that it wasn't a major issue for most players. I actually never noticed the install size bug because I have a $75 1TB drive for games and even at its worst, HD2 consumed only a bit over 10% of that.
It certainly must have been challenging for the developers. There has been a constant stream of new content, and an entirely new platform (Xbox) added since release. Perhaps more frustratingly for the development team, there has also been a neverending parade of rebalancing work which has consumed a lot of cycles. Some of this rebalancing work was unavoidable (in a complex game, millions of players will find bugs and meta strategies that could never be uncovered by testing alone) and some was the result of perhaps-avoidable internal discord regarding the game's creative direction.
The game is also somewhat difficult to balance and test by design. There are 10 difficulty levels and 3 enemy factions. It's almost like 30 separate games. This is an excellent feature of the game, but it would be fair to Arrowhead for perhaps biting off more than any team can chew.
Get rid of 80% of that duplication for a 2x instead of a 5x slowdown would be something.
That makes no goddamn sense. I’ve read it three times and to paraphrase Babbage, I cannot apprehend the confusion of thought that would lead to such a conclusion.
5x gets resources to investigate, not assumed to be correct and then doubled. Orders of magnitude change implementations, as we see here. And it sounds like they just manufactured one out of thin air.
HDD and SSD, where SSD is deduplicated.
Im.sure some gamers will develop funny opinions, but for the last 8 years I have not had a HDD in sight inside my gaming or work machines. I'd very much rather save space if the load time is about the same.on an SSD. A 150gb install profile is absolute insanity.
The optimization was not ill-advised. It is in fact, an industry standard and is strongly advised. Their own internal testing revealed that they are one of the supposedly rare cases where this optimization did not have a noticeably positive effect worth the costs.
> 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.
It's literally "instead of profiling our own app we profiled competition's app and made decisions based on that".
They made an effort to improve the product, but because everything in tech comes with side effects it turned out to be a bad decision which they rolled back. Sounds like highly professional behavior to me by people doing their best. Not everything will always work out, 100% of the time.
And this might finally reverse the trend of games being >100gb as other teams will be able to point to this decision why they shouldn't implement this particular optimization prematurely
Never trust a report that highlights the outliers before even discussing the mean. Never trust someone who thinks that is a sane way to use of statistics. At best they are not very sharp, and at worst they are manipulating you.
> We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
Ok, now that's absolutely ridiculous and treating the reader like a complete idiot. "We took the absolute best case scenario reported by something we read somewhere, and doubled it without giving a second thought, because WTF not?. Since this took us 5 seconds to do, we went with that until you started complaining".
Making up completely random numbers on the fly would have made exactly the same amount of sense.
Trying to spin this whole thing into "look at how smart we are that we reverted our own completely brain-dead decision" is the cherry on top.
I'm sure that whatever project you're assigned to has a lot of optimization stuff in the backlog that you'd love to work on but haven't had a chance to visit because bugfixes, new features, etc. I'm sure the process at Arrowhead is not much different.
For sure, duplicating those assets on PC installs turned out to be the wrong call.
But install sizes were still pretty reasonable for the first 12+ months or so. I think it was ~40-60GB at launch. Not great but not a huge deal and they had mountains of other stuff to focus on.
When the documented worst case is 5x you prepare for the potential bad news that you will hit 2.5x to 5x in your own code. Not assume it will be 10x and preemptively act, keeping your users from installing three other games.
In my experience it's always been quite a battle to spend time on perf.
I'll happily take a demotion if I make a 10x performance goof like that. As long as I can get promoted eventually if I make enough 10x wins.
People are more likely to thank me after the fact than cheer me on. My point, if I have one, is that gaming has generally been better about this but I don’t really want to work on games. Not the way the industry is. But since we are in fact discussing a game, I’m doing a lot of head scratching on this one.
That’s the sort of mistake that leads to announcing a 4x reduction in install size.
Or, you know, they just didn't really understand industry recommendations or what they were doing.
"Turns out our game actually spends most of its loading time generating terrain on the CPU" is not something you accidentally discover, and should have been known before they even thought about optimizing the game's loading time, since optimizing without knowing your own stats is not optimizing, and they wrote the code that loads the game!
Keep in mind this is the same team that accidentally caused instantly respawning patrols in an update about "Balancing how often enemy patrols spawn", the same group that couldn't make a rocket launcher lock on for months while blaming "Raycasts are hard", and released a mech that would shoot itself if you turned wrong, and spent the early days insisting that "The game is supposed to be hard" as players struggled with enemy armor calculations that would punish you for not shooting around enemy armor because it was calculating the position of that armor incorrectly, and tons of other outright broken functionality that have made it hard to play the game at times.
Not only do Arrowhead have kind of a long history of technical mediocrity (Magicka was pretty crashy on release, and has weird code even after all the bugfixes), but they also demonstrably do not test their stuff very well, and regularly release patches that have obvious broken things that you run into seconds into starting play, or even have outright regressions suggesting an inability to do version control.
"We didn't test whether our game was even slow to load on HDD in the first place before forcing the entire world to download and store 5x the data" is incompetence.
None of this gets into the utterly absurd gameplay decisions they have made, or the time they spent insulting players for wanting a game they spent $60 on to be fun and working.
Some many game design crimes have a storage limitation at their core e.g. levels that are just a few rooms connected by tunnels or elevators.
It didn't help their game load noticeably faster. They just hadn't checked if the optimization actually helped.
> 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.
No, they measured it now, not first. The very text you pasted is very clear about that, so I'm not sure why you're contradicting it.
If they had measured it first, this post would not exist.
But this means that before they blindly trusted
some stats without actually testing how their
game performed with and without it?
I'm just a little baffled by people harping on this decision and deciding that the developers must be stupid or lazy.
I mean, seriously, I do not understand. Like what do you get out of that? That would make you happy or satisfied somehow?
I never called anyone lazy or stupid, I just wondered whether they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing them.
> FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time
Wouldn't this mean their optimization mattered even less back then?
premature optimization
It's certainly true that a lot of optimization can and should be done after a software project is largely complete. You can see where the hotspots are, optimize the most common SQL queries, whatever. This is especially true for CRUD apps where you're not even really making fundamental architecture decisions at all, because those have already been made by your framework of choice.
Other sorts of projects (like games or "big data" processing) can be a different beast. You do have to make some of those big, architecture-level performance decisions up front.
Remember, for a game... you are trying to process player inputs, do physics, and render a complex graphical scene in 16.7 milliseconds or less. You need to make some big decisions early on; performance can't entirely just be sprinkled on at the end. Some of those decisions don't pan out.
> FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time
Wouldn't this mean their optimization mattered even less back then?
To be clear, I'm not misquoting Knuth if that's what you mean. I'm arguing that in this case, specifically, this optimization was premature, as evidenced by the fact it didn't really have an impact (they explain other processes that run in parallel dominated the load times) and it caused trouble down the line.
> Some of those decisions don't pan out.
Indeed, some premature optimizations will and some won't. I'm not arguing otherwise! In this case, it was a bad call. It happens to all of us.
> I don't see a reason to think this. What are you thinking?
You're right, I got this backwards. While the time savings would have been minimal, the data duplication wasn't that big so the cost (for something that didn't pan out) wasn't that bad either.
I have friends who play one or two games and want them to load fast. Others have dozens and want storage space.
Game size is a problem in every new triple A release.
Maybe, kinda, sorta, on some games, on some spinning rust hard disks, if you held your hand just right and the Moon was real close to the cusp.
If you're still using spinning rust in a PC that you attempt to run modern software on, please drop me a message. I'll send you a tenner so you can buy yourself an SSD.
However a lot of people have TINY SSDs. Think 500 gigabyte.
I am not the one who loads last in the multiplayer lobbies.
The entire current insistence about "HDD is slow to load" is just cargo cult bullshit.
The Mass Effect remastered collection loads off of a microSD card faster than the animation takes to get into the elevator.
Loading is slow because games have to take all that data streaming in off the disk and do things with it. They have to parse data structures, build up objects in memory, make decisions, pass data off to the GPU etc etc. A staggering amount of games load no faster off a RAM disk.
For instance, Fallout 4 loading is hard locked to the frame rate. The only way to load faster is to turn off the frame limiter, but that breaks physics, so someone made a mod to turn it off only while loading. SSD vs HDD makes zero difference otherwise.
We live in a world where even shaders take a second worth of processing before you can use them, and they are like hundreds of bytes. Disk performance is not the bottleneck.
Some games will demonstrate some small amount of speedup if you move them to SSD. Plenty wont. More people should really experiment with this, it's a couple clicks in steam to move a game.
If bundling together assets to reduce how much file system and drive seek work you have to do multiplies your install size by 5x, your asset management is terrible. Even the original playstation, with a seek time of 300ish ms and a slow as hell drive and more CD space than anyone really wanted didn't duplicate data that much, and you could rarely afford any in game loading.
I wish they gave any details. How the hell are you bundling things to get that level of data duplication? Were they bundling literally everything else into single bundles for every map? Did every single map file also include all the assets for all weapons and skins and all animations of characters and all enemy types? That would explain how it grew so much over time, as each weapon you added would actually take sizeOfWeaponNumMaps space, but that's stupid as fuck. Seeking an extra file takes a max of one frame* longer than just loading the same amount of data as one file.
Every now and then Arrowhead says something that implies they are just utterly clueless. They have such a good handle of how games can be fun though. At least when they aren't maliciously bullying their players.
They're using the outdated stingray engine and this engine is designed for the days of single or dual core computers with spinning disks. They developed their game with this target in mind.
Mind you, spinning disks are not only a lot more rare today but also much faster than when Stingray 1.0 was released. Something like 3-4x faster.
The game was never a loading hog and I imagine by the time they launched and realized how big this install would be, the technical debt was too much. The monetary cost of labor hours to undo this must have been significant, so they took the financial decision of "We'll keep getting away with it until we can't."
The community finally got fed up. The steamdb chart keeps inching lower and lower and I think they finally got worried about permanently losing players that they conceded and did this hoping to get those players back and to avoid a further exodus.
And lets say this game is now much worse on spinning disk. At the end of the day AH will choose profit. If they lose that 10% spinning disk people who wont tolerate the few seconds change, the game will please the other players, thus making sure its lives on.
Lastly, this is how its delivered on console, many of which use spinning media. So its hard to see this as problematic. I'm guessing for console MS and Sony said no to a 150gb install so AG was invested in keeping it small. They were forced to redo the game for console without this extra data. The time and money there was worth it for them. For PC, there's no one to say no, so they did the cheapest thing they could until they no longer could.
This is one of the downsides of open platforms. There's no 'parent' to yell at you, so you do what you want. Its the classic walled garden vs open bazaar type thing.
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.