A Helldivers 2 developer has defined to gamers why the PC model of the sport takes up round thrice extra cupboard space than the console variations.
In a prolonged ‘tech weblog’ posted on the sport’s official Reddit web page, Arrowhead Recreation Studios deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong defined why the 150GB set up dimension on PC is triple that on PS5 and Xbox Sequence X/S, and why there’s no straightforward repair but.
Armstrong defined that the primary cause for that is to cater for gamers who nonetheless use mechanical arduous disk drives (HDDs) to play their video games, and the necessity to duplicate content material to enhance loading speeds for them.
“An HDD shops knowledge on a spinning platter, and a bodily arm with a learn head has to maneuver throughout the platter to search out and retrieve knowledge,” he wrote. “The time it takes for this arm to ‘search’ or transfer to the right location is a major efficiency bottleneck.
“To resolve this drawback, we intentionally duplicate sure knowledge recordsdata (like a standard tree texture or a sound impact) and place copies of them in bodily shut proximity to the place they might be wanted within the sport. For instance, our construct system will be sure that a replica of a tree texture is saved on the identical a part of the disk as the extent geometry knowledge.
“When the sport masses the extent, the learn head can entry all the required data in a single, steady sweep, with out having to ‘search’ to a unique location. This dramatically hastens loading instances.”
Most high-end PCs and all fashionable consoles now use strong state drives (SSDs) which don’t have any transferring components, that is not a difficulty as a result of ‘search time’ is nearly on the spot. “This is without doubt one of the key explanation why new video games typically explicitly require an SSD of their minimal system specs,” Armstrong mentioned.
Noting that whether or not the PC model ought to proceed to optimise for HDD customers is “the six million greenback query”, Armstrong mentioned the issue was that HDDs are a part of the sport’s minimal spec PC necessities and there’s at the moment no method of precisely figuring out what number of gamers nonetheless use one (Arrowhead’s “very unreliable” estimates put it at round 12% of PC gamers).
He additionally defined that the answer isn’t so simple as eradicating duplicated belongings and simply giving HDD gamers longer loading instances, because the studio “can not remove all duplication with out making loading instances for mechanical HDDs 10 instances slower, and we don’t really feel that that is acceptable”.
He additionally notes that such modifications would have an effect on all gamers, not simply PC HDD customers, as a result of when a squad drops right into a mission all gamers have to attend till everybody has loaded the sport earlier than it might probably start.
One other potential resolution to make hi-res 4K textures elective for SDD customers has additionally been rejected for now, as a result of whereas Armstrong says “something is feasible” he additionally notes that this isn’t natively supported within the sport’s engine and can be “a considerable challenge” to implement.
As an alternative, the crew is engaged on a three-stage plan to resolve the difficulty, beginning with the subsequent replace which has eliminated some unused belongings and different points. “You’ll not going discover them as a result of the brand new stuff we’ve added will eat these beneficial properties,” Armstrong warned. “It’s not a game-changer however a minimum of the set up dimension will cease rising.”
Past this the crew is “exploring taking a number of the worst offenders by way of duplication and de-duplicating them by placing them in ‘quite common belongings’ bundles which is able to at all times be loaded below set situations (e.g. particular faction/biome)”.
“This does imply that loading instances will get a bit worse for gamers utilizing mechanical HDDs – it’s unlucky however unavoidable,” Armstrong mentioned. “Our early testing exhibits we should always have the ability to maintain this within the vary of ‘lower than 30 seconds’ somewhat than ‘a number of minutes’.”
Long term, Arrowhead plans to make enhancements to the engine which is able to make RAM use much less wasteful, however past that Armstrong warns that “the remaining work is an even bigger, riskier, extra speculative challenge the place we apply some form of compression to the sport knowledge and doubtlessly replicate a number of the de-duplication we do on consoles”.
Summarising, Armstrong mentioned the crew was taking participant considerations severely however “there aren’t any straightforward options”, and that “till we reside in a world the place we all know that almost all of our PC gamers are utilizing SSD drives, sacrificing some further arduous drive area is important to make sure we’re all in a position to load into missions in an inexpensive period of time”.
“We’ve clearly reached the bounds of how a lot duplicated knowledge is appropriate so smarter options and compromises at the moment are required.,” he concluded. “We’re very fastidiously weighing up the prices and trade-offs of the choices we’ve, and we’ll you should definitely discover a higher stability between loading instances and set up dimension quickly.”
