>>1985687
I had to look up their tech blog because I couldn't believe it was real, and it is, but the REASONING behind why they duplicated data is even more stupidly insane, here's a quote from the same update:
>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.
So they made a decision to duplicate data, based on an assumption from "industry data", not their own tests, to supposedly reduce loading time of assets, without realizing that the assets were not even responsible for the majority of loading time because they were generating the level data in parallel with loading assets, so the level generation mattered more than loading hi-res assets, why they didn't test this wasn't one of the first things they tried to verify absolutely astounds me.
After looking up why "duplicate data" would save on load times, this all seems even more stupid, because originally this was done on optical discs for consoles because of how long it took for the head to seek on the disc from inner to outer edge, so having duplicate data closer to the stripe where the game is already accessing data made sense, the head didn't have to travel far to get the data it needed and it drastically improved load times for consoles. Hard disk drives already being so fast with 7200rpm being the fastest you could get, this technique doesn't really make any sense, and there's really no guarantee the data is going to be written in areas close together unless you have a partition
just for the install directory, where the partition is made close to the inside of the disk platters. On SSDs it's totally fucking pointless because access speeds are virtually instant no matter where data is.