Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Studios still doesn’t have a solution for the shooter’s groaning installation size on PC — but it is working on it.
In an update posted to Steam earlier today, Arrowhead’s deputy technical director, Brendan Armstrong, penned the first in a series of posts in which the engineering team talks about the “technical health” of the game, as well as the “technical challenges we’re working through.”
Admitting that the installation size “seems to be a hot topic right now” — at 150GB, Helldivers 2 takes up three times the space on PC than it does on console — the developer revealed that one of the reasons the PC size is so much bigger is because of data duplication and mechanical hard drives.
“The main issue with a mechanical HDD is seek time,” Armstrong explained. “An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for this arm to ‘seek’ or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.
“Imagine a large game level with various objects — trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.”
This, the director added, is why Arrowhead deliberately duplicates certain data files like a common tree texture or a sound effect and “place copies of them in physically close proximity to where they would be needed in the game.”
“Much of the data in the PC version of Helldivers 2 is duplicated. The practice of duplicating data to reduce loading times is a game development technique that is primarily used to optimize games for older storage media, particularly mechanical HDDs and optical discs like DVDs,” the director explained. “This practice is largely unnecessary for games deployed on Solid State Drives (SSDs) which is why the console versions of Helldivers 2 do not do this.”
That said, the post admits that with the advent of SSDs — which store data on flash memory chips that have no moving parts — seek time is virtually nonexistent, but as long as mechanical HDDs are part of the minimum spec PC requirements, it has to be included. Steam user surveys are “unable to give us data on mechanical HDD use in the overall gamer population,” but Arrowhead’s “best estimates” put it at around 12% of all PC gamers.
“Until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs that Helldivers 2 is installed on, it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication,” the post said. “Even if that number is small, keep in mind that the load time for each player dropping into a mission is determined by the slowest member of the squad.”
While Arrowhead grapples with this issue and tries to get better data on how many of their players use mechanical HDDs, the team said it’s made “some small gains in the next update” by sweeping for unused assets and “obvious problems,” but admits we “will not likely notice them because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains.”
In the longer term, the team will make improvements to the engine to ensure the game doesn’t waste RAM loading common data that isn’t needed.
“Beyond that, the remaining work is a bigger, riskier, more speculative project where we apply some kind of compression to the game data and potentially replicate some of the de-duplication we do on consoles,” the post concludes. “We don’t yet know if the impacts to load-times could make these approaches infeasible.
“We’re taking your concerns very seriously but there are no easy solutions. Until we live in a world where we know that most of our PC players are using SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space is necessary to ensure we’re all able to load into missions in a reasonable amount of time. We’ve clearly reached the limits of how much duplicated data is acceptable so smarter solutions and compromises are now required. We are very carefully weighing up the costs and tradeoffs of the options we have, and we’ll be sure to find a better balance between loading times and installation size soon.”
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
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