alt Hacker News> The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs.
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.
5x space is going to be hard to beat, but one should always be careful about hiding behind a tall tent pole like this. IO isn’t free, it’s cheap. So if they could generate terrain with no data loading it would likely be a little faster. But someone might find a way to speed up generation and then think it’s pointless/not get the credit they deserve because then loading is the tall tent pole.
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.