Submitted 3 weeks ago by ZippyBot@lemmy.zip [bot] to gaming@lemmy.zip
These loading time projections were based on industry data
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.
They also took the worst case predictions and then doubled them to be “conservative”.
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.
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?
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.
That should be an option they add, not something forced on every user. A lot games are just poorly made..
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…
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…
not half as impressive as that guy that rewrote mario 64 engine to run at 60fps on a real n64
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.
every studio needs at least one person like him on the team and give them enough authority to not get fucked over by corporate
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, and Rockstar devs, please take note. Oh, and you too, ID Software. I don’t like Doom Eternal being 89 GB.
Don't forget Wildcard. Ark Survival is an absurd 200+ Gb monstrosity. And there is sooooo much duplicate data.
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).
ark survival evolved being 203gb :/
With the DLCs it’s half a terabyte.
Nothing good to expect from Ark.
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 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.
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.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 weeks ago
154GB down to
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Did they remove the folder with old debug builds from the setup?
SalamenceFury@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No, they just had a fuckton of duplicate files so HDDs could load the maps faster.