Silly citizen, going off to questionable meetups during a war on dissidents

Gotta get them rare space metals

I just went prone and could grab the samples without digging at all. Saved picking up the shovel. Hoping this method still works now

I can also confirm I had issues on my first mission drop in load screen. Me and my friend nearly crashed (froze and hard stuttered for about 5 seconds), and then it started slowly smoothing out. After that, every single drop in load was super smooth, no stutters nor near crashes.

We were both on the slim beta.

My best guess is some kind of first time shader compile for the epic load screen scenery, on top of what is already an intensive process. IIRC, this is when the map is also being generated.

Steam reports 22.01GB for me. Had a crash first time mission load after launching but that could've been due to the update itself; the rest of the 3 hour sess I had no issues and my buddy who didn't opt in to the beta also crashed during first mission load

I'm glad to see pcmasterrace be 13 GBs smaller than PS5 [35(?)GBs on PS5].

Anyone know the Xbox install size?

What.

The fuck.

A dev that actually went through the trouble of compressing their game?

Impressed slow clap.

Wonder if they are using dwarfs?

https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs

I think you might have some sort of problem, mine never takes very long at all to update. I have a five year old PC, roughly.

Will it allow me to run updates that don't take 45-60 minutes to apply even though I have the game installed on an NVME drive?

Literally uninstalled the game because I was tired of waiting forever for updates to apply every few days.

It's not just for SSD users, it's for everyone:

Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases.

Only a few seconds difference?

Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. 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.

Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). 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.

Stitching all 4k textures together for each level go brrrr

They fixed the stuttering when dropping into missions

I’ve had a few little stutters but nothing compared to before. Which is great because I absolutely freaking love the hellpod drop sequence!

Sorry I was ranting about a couple loosely related things (which have more to do with a general attitude of the industry) and thus was not clear.

What I meant to say was that I speak a lot with programmers who treat resources (be it computational, RAM, or disk space) as free and infinite.

This is indeed only about disk space (as far as I can tell). Although, their post does explain that the reason for the bloated build was to speed up loading times with duplication of data (if fact they quadrupled it even) because they were allegedly afraid of the loading times on older HDDs.

Memory requirements? Or hard-drive? Would this change impact on both?

By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from 154GB to 23GB, for a total saving of 131GB (~85%).

Jesus Christ that's a lot of duplicated data.

holy shit, this is gonna stay installed on my steam deck now

The install size isn't what bugs me.

It's the CPU bound performance making it run like shit unless you set it to potato graphics. Make it utilize the GPU more.

And that's just by removing unused assets, not doing anything clever /s

Jokes aside, a pet peeve of mine is how most of my colleagues seem to think memory is free, and that if something is too computationally intensive, too bad, nothing we can do but wait for the hardware to "catch up". So it's good to see some effort to curb the insane (and useless) memory requirements of modern games from time to time.

Doubtful. There are games I was dissuaded to get just because of their massive size.

154 GB to 23 GB

Lowkey makes me question whether the theories of publishers inflating file size to monopolize gamers hard drives and, thus, their time, could carry more weight than I previously thought.

I know Nanite can enable some massive assets to ship, so maybe that’s part of the current file size situation. Also uncompressed audio can be really big!

But this is like 1/6 the file size, without reducing quality or compressing data… that’s insane!

TL;DR, although one would have expected lower quality textures and other assets,they're actually achieving this by deduplicating data which was originally duplicated to reduce loading times. They've found a way to deduplicate without affecting loading times. (Lossless compression might be involved too -- post is vague.) They'll make this the new default version of the game after ironing out the bugs.

Good info, thank you.

They added a way to significantly reduce the install size if you are using a SSD https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/491583942944621371?l=english