Helldivers 2 The Arrowhead Studios developer still does not have a solution for the size of the PC shooter installation – but it works above it.
IN update The Deputy Technical Director of Arrowhead, a previously sent to Steam, Brendan Armstrong, wrote the first of a series of posts in which the engineering team talks about the “technical health” of the game, as well as about “technical challenges we are working on”.
Admitting that the size of the installation “seems to be a hot topic now” – at 150 GB, Helldivers 2 occupies a PC space three times than on the console – the programmer revealed that one of the reasons why the size of the computer is much larger, is duplicating data and mechanical strenuous drives.
“The main problem with a mechanical hard disk is time to search,” explained Armstrong. “HDD stores data on a rotating plate, and the physical arm with the head of the read must move through the plate to find and download the data. The time needed to” search “or switching to the right location is a significant narrow bottleneck.
“Imagine a high level of game with various objects – trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is dispersed all over the strenuous disk, the reading head must physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the charging process.”
This, as the director added, which is why Arrowhead deliberately reproduces some data files, such as a common texture of a tree or a sound effect and “place their copies in close proximity to where they would be needed in the game.”
“A enormous part of the PC Helldivers 2 version is reproduced. The practice of duplicating data in order to shorten the charging times is a technique of gaming development, which is primarily used to optimize games for older memory media, especially mechanical strenuous disk and optical disks such as DVD” – explained the director. “This practice is largely unnecessary in the case of games implemented on solid drives (SSDS), which is why the Helldivers 2 console versions do not do it.”
To say, the post admits that with the appearance of SSDs – which store data on flash memory systems, which have no moving parts – the search time is practically non -existent, but as long as mechanical HDD is part of the minimum requirements for PC SPEC, they should be taken into account. Steam user surveys “are not able to provide us with data on the mechanical utilize of strenuous strenuous level in the general population of players”, but Arrowhead “best estimates” put on about 12% of all players on the PC.
“Until we are able to determine the number of mechanical strenuous disk on which Helldivers 2 is installed more accurately, it is hard to know how many players will reduce the amount of duplication of data,” said the post. “Even if this number is diminutive, remember that charging time for every player falling into the mission is determined by the slowest team member.”
While Arrowhead is struggling with this problem and tries to get better data on how many players use the mechanical hard disk, the team said that they achieved “slight profits in the next update” by sweeping unused assets and “obvious problems”, but he admits that “we probably do not notice them, because we added modern things that add these benefits.”
In the long run, the team will introduce engine improvements to make sure that the game does not waste common data charging of RAM, which are not needed.
“In addition, the remaining work is a larger, more risky, more speculative project in which we utilize some kind of compression for the game data and potentially repeat part of the de-ups we perform on consoles,” sums up the post. “We do not know yet whether the impact on the load time can make these approaches impossible.
“We take your fears very seriously, but there are no easy solutions. As long as we live in a world where we know that most of our computer players use SSDs, devoting an additional hard disk space it is necessary for us to be able to charge ourselves to the mission in a reasonable time. We clearly achieved the limits of how many duplicate data is acceptable, so intelligent solutions And certainly we will find a better balance between the charging time and the size of the installation.
Vikki Blake is an IGN reporter, as well as a critic, columnist and consultant with over 15 years of experience in working with the world’s largest sites and publications. He is also a guardian, Spartan, quiet Hillian, legend and eternally high chaos. Find her in Blues.
