Helldivers 2 install size reduction effort yields 131GB in cuts, and you can try the slim build right now
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/helldivers-2-install-size-reduction-effort-yields-131gb-in-cuts-and-you-can-try-the-slim-build-right-now
105 points · 29 comments · view on lemmy.world
29 Comments
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com · 52 pts · 270d
154GB down to 23GB lol
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com · 11 pts · 270d
Did they remove the folder with old debug builds from the setup?
SalamenceFury@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 270d
No, they just had a fuckton of duplicate files so HDDs could load the maps faster.
Sagan_Wept@lemmynsfw.com · 6 pts · 270d
Holy shit!? Maybe I can finally play it from my family library. I tried to install it just yesterday and gave up when I saw the size
victorz@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 270d
I knew devs could do it if they just put their mind to it. Shit is growing out of hand these days.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de · 36 pts · 270d
Good reminder that lots of industry "knowledge" is just as scientific as the story your great grandpa always used to tell about the war. So much stuff just gets established once and then never questioned again.
kieron115@startrek.website · 5 pts · 270d
They also took the worst case predictions and then doubled them to be "conservative".
snooggums@piefed.world · 29 pts · 270d
Good, the install size was ridiculous and this will also increase the likelihood of other games who took a similar bloat approach for HDDs might double check their assumptions and possibly pare down their duplication as well.
sidebro@lemmy.zip · 20 pts · 270d
How is that 131GB in cuts?! If the game alone was 131GB I'd say that's enough, but that's just what they cut?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip · 26 pts · 270d
From reading the article (gasp!):
It looks like a large chunk of it was that they were optimizing their release for spinning disk hard drives (HDDs). With HDDs and optical media, there is a substantial impact on performance when you are fetching data that is physically close to the last data you looked at. So a common technique was to actually duplicate commonly used data.
As an example: You fight Tyranids on sandy and snowy planets. The assets for each of those planets are in different parts of the disc/install. But you'll need those same bugs in each planet so... you also install the Tyranid assets alongside each planet's assets for fast fetching.
This is ALSO why disk defragmentation used to be so important.
But if you are assuming that everyone has an SSD (or better), those access times are nowhere near as crippling and it is a lot easier to just install the assets once.
warm@kbin.earth · 16 pts · 270d
That should be an option they add, not something forced on every user. A lot games are just poorly made..
Orygin@sh.itjust.works · 13 pts · 270d
I can understand some duplication but they removed nearly 6 times the amount of data the actual game needs. It's insane that this was published like that...
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip · 11 pts · 270d
And it is not at all uncommon.
There is a reason that, back in the day, there were a LOT of ways to compress game installs so that you could burn it to a CD-R and so forth. And this was incredibly prevalent on consoles up until the current generation when SSDs became default... except that a lot of games were still being developed for previous gen and older hardware PCs.
When Blizzard made a big deal about how WoW now requires an SSD? It was for stuff like this.
LiveLM@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 270d
I wonder why they even did that in the first place.
SSDs have been common in the PC space for a while, and this game didn't come out for last-gen consoles like the PS4 who still shipped with spinning rust...
Grass@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 270d
not half as impressive as that guy that rewrote mario 64 engine to run at 60fps on a real n64. really this should be expected of big studios especially big sellers like helldivers
Theta775@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 270d
Kaze Emanuar! He has done some seriously cool stuff with the N64. Imagine if someone with his skills got their hands on literally any game as big as Helldivers.
Grass@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 270d
every studio needs at least one person like him on the team and give them enough authority to not get fucked over by corporate
rafoix@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 270d
Best they can do is layoff when the game ships.
SalamenceFury@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 270d
I remember once Fortnite did something similar and shaved the install size from 75 GB down to 30 GB or so. And now it's mega bloated again...
Activision, Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar devs, please take note. Oh, and you too, ID Software. I don't like Doom Eternal being 89 GB. At least Battlefield 6 is only 37 GB if you only have Multiplayer installed without the high-res textures.
Maestro@fedia.io · 14 pts · 270d
Don't forget Wildcard. Ark Survival is an absurd 200+ Gb monstrosity. And there is sooooo much duplicate data.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 269d
The infuriating part is they did eventually do some deduplication to reduce the install size - but only for the terrible UE5 remake that runs like crap and forces existing players to rebuy all the DLC (it's like $150 for everything).
Quadrexium@sopuli.xyz · 9 pts · 270d
ark survival evolved being 203gb :/
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 270d
With the DLCs it's half a terabyte. The bloat is insane.
LiveLM@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 270d
Ark has always been a mess, nothing good to expect from this
Maestro@fedia.io · 3 pts · 269d
I can tell you why too. They fucked up the map structure at the beginning. They made the world the top level and all the dino and plant assets are under that. Not a problem in the beginning when it's just one map. But they added a second, and a third etc. and all maps needed to contain a copy of those assets. Worse, they let players transport stuff from one map to another. So if you only have the base game, your friend can come visit and use the pokeball to spawn in a couple of dragons or other DLC creature. You need to be able to see that so you need to have those assets too, even in just the base game. So, now every map needs to have a copy of all possible dinos from all DLCs. 11 maps. 11 copies of all assets. Bye bye drive space.
SalamenceFury@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 270d
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!!!!!
This just reminds me of the absolute horror that was Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019). The entire thing, with Warzone (that you couldn't uninstall, btw) was 250 fucking GB. Like, what the actual fuck?
I still wonder how the HELL I managed to play that game with nothing but a GTX 950, an FX-4300 processor, and 8 GB of RAM. Which, even for 2019, was an absolutely TERRIBLE computer.
elgordino@fedia.io · 5 pts · 270d
Interesting, so it does load the data slower, it’s just that the world generation process runs in parallel and is even slower. Thus allowing loads of headroom for the data loading.
SaneMartigan@aussie.zone · 5 pts · 270d
TLDR: Goto Steam, HD2 Properties, Betas, select Prod_slim from the drop down menu, then reinstall. Expect bugs and crashes.
warm@kbin.earth · 3 pts · 270d
Every triple A game is made like ass and suffers the same bloated file size problem.