alt Hacker NewsThere was a thread here earlier this month,
> Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178
Section of the top comment says,
> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
and the reply to it has,
> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.
Replies
That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice?
Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.
I don't think it's quite that simple. The reason they had such a large install size in the first place was due to concern about the load times for players using HDDs instead of SSDs; duplicating the data was intended to be a way to avoid making some players load into levels much more slowly than others (which in an online multiplayer game would potentially have repercussions for other players as well). The link you give mentions that this was based on flawed data (although it's somewhat light on those details), but that's means the actual cause was a combination of a technical mistake and the presence of care for user experience, just not the experience of the majority at the expense of the smaller but not insignificant minority. There's certainly room for argument about whether this was the correct judgement call to make or that they should have been better at recognizing their data was flawed, but it doesn't really seem like it fits the trends of devs not giving a shit about user experience. If making perfect judgement calls and never having flawed data is the bar for proving you care about users, we might as well just give up on the idea that any companies will ever reach it.
How about GitHub actions with safe sleep that took over a year to accept a trivial PR that fixed a bug that caused actions to hang forever because someone forgot that you need <= instead of == in a counter...
Though in this case GitHub wasn't bearing the cost, it was gaining a profit...
> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.
I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here.
AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made.
There was also the GTA wasting minutes to load/parse JSON files at startup. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the...
Sometimes the performance is really ignored.