alt Hacker NewsI've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed.
I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.
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Performance profiling should be built into the engine and turned on at all times. Then this telemetry could be streamed into a system that tracks it across all builds, down to a specific scene. It should be possible to click a link on the telemetry server and start the game at that exact point.
>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.
>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 did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.
They admitted to testing nothing, they just [googled it].
To be fair, the massive install size was probably the least of the problems with the game, it's performance has been atrocious, and when they released for xbox, the update that came with it broke the game entirely for me and was unplayable for a few weeks until they released another update.
In their defense, they seem to have been listening to players and have been slowly but steadily improving things.
Playing Helldivers 2 is a social thing for me where I get together online with some close friends and family a few times a month and we play some helldivers and have a chat, aside from that period where I couldn't play because it was broken, it's been a pretty good experience playing it on Linux; even better since I switched from nvidia to AMD just over a week ago.
I'm glad they reduced the install size and saved me ~130GB, and I only had to download about another 20GB to do it.