Helldivers 2 Developer Arrowhead Studios would not have an answer for the moan set up measurement for shooter video games but, however they’re engaged on it.
in replace Posted on Steam early right this moment, Arrowhead’s Affiliate Technical Director Brendan Armstrong wrote the primary in a collection of posts through which the engineering staff talks concerning the “technical well being” and “technical challenges” of the sport.
It admits that the set up measurement “sees like a sizzling subject proper now.” At 150GB, the Helldivers 2 takes up 3 times the house on a PC than the console – the builders have revealed that one of many the explanation why the PC measurement is so massive is because of information replication and mechanical arduous drives.
“The primary drawback with mechanical HDDs is search time,” Armstrong defined. “HDD shops information in a spinning platter. Additionally, the bodily arm with a learn head should transfer throughout the platter to search out and retrieve information. The time it takes for this arm to “discover” or transfer to the right location is a vital efficiency bottleneck.
“Think about a big recreation stage with quite a lot of objects, together with bushes, rocks, buildings, props, and so on. If the info for these objects is scattered all around the arduous drive, the learn head must bodily soar the disk.
This is the reason the director deliberately replicates sure information recordsdata, reminiscent of frequent tree textures and sound results, and “locations copies in shut proximity the place the sport wants them.”
“Lots of the information within the PC model of Helldivers 2 is replicated. Practices to duplicate information that reduces loading occasions are recreation improvement methods which can be primarily used to optimize video games on older storage media, particularly optical discs reminiscent of mechanical HDDs and DVDs,” the director defined. “This apply is nearly pointless for video games deployed on Stable State Drives (SSDS). This is the reason the console model of Helldivers 2 would not do that.”
That mentioned, this submit acknowledges that with the arrival of SSDs, information is saved on flash reminiscence chips with no cell elements – search occasions are nearly non-existent, however must be included so long as mechanical HDDs are a part of the minimal spec PC necessities. A survey of Steam customers discovered that “we’re unable to offer information on mechanical HDD utilization throughout avid gamers,” however Arrowhead’s “greatest estimate” got here to round 12% of all PC avid gamers.
“It is troublesome to know what number of gamers can be affected by lowering the quantity of knowledge replicas till you may extra precisely decide the variety of mechanical HDDs with Helldivers 2 put in,” the submit states. “Please be aware that even when the quantity is small, every participant’s loading time will fall into missions can be decided by the slowest member of the staff.”
Arrowhead is engaged on this difficulty and is making an attempt to get higher information on the variety of gamers utilizing mechanical HDDs, however the staff mentioned they “have some advantages within the subsequent replace” by clearing up unused property and “apparent points,” however “the brand new ones we have added will not discover it’s going to profit from them.”
In the long term, groups will enhance their engines to keep away from losing normal information that does not require video games.
“Past that, the remainder of the work is a bigger, extra dangerous, extra speculative undertaking that might doubtlessly apply some compression to the sport information and doubtlessly replicate among the deduplication that may happen on the console,” the submit concludes. “We nonetheless do not know if the affect on load time could make these approaches unfeasible.
“We take your issues very severely, however there isn’t any straightforward resolution. It’s essential to sacrifice additional arduous drive house to make sure that we are able to load onto the mission inside an affordable time till we reside in a world the place most PC gamers know that SSD drives are utilizing. We’ve got so we are able to shortly discover out the steadiness between loading time and set up measurement.”
Vikki Blake is an videogameaddicted reporter, critic, columnist and guide, with over 15 years of expertise working with among the world’s largest gaming websites and publications. She can be a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and continuously excessive chaos. Discover her Blue snowboarding.