[rovr138]

There was a thread here earlier this month,

> Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178

Section of the top comment says,

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

and the reply to it has,

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.

[viraptor]

There was also the GTA wasting minutes to load/parse JSON files at startup. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the...

Sometimes the performance is really ignored.

[mattmanser]

I met a seasoned game dev who complained to me he was only ever hired at the end of projects to speed up the code a bunch of mid/junior level game devs the company had used to actually make the game. Basically he said there was only so much time he'd get given, and he'd have to go for low hanging fruit and might miss stuff.

We've only got a couple of game dev shops in my city, so not sure how common that is.

[whstl]

Sweatshops love junior devs, as they never complain, never make suggestions and always take the blame for bugs.

A senior joining when time is tight makes sense, they don’t want anyone to rock the boat, just to plug the holes.

[AuthAuth]

Im pretty sure that CS rendering teeth a mile away turned out to be false. But it was repeated so much and the game release state was (and still is) so bad people assumed it to be true.

[darubedarob]

Wasn' there a website with formula on how much time things like the GTA bug costed humanity as a whole? Like 5 minutes × users× sessionsperday accumulated?

It cost several human lifetimes if i remember correctly. Still not as bad as windows update which taking the time times wage has set the gdp of a small nation on fire every year..

[ux266478]

That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice?

Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.

[swiftcoder]

> It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch

The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.

[MBCook]

Was Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase?

The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary.

Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.

[esseph]

It's a completely different game, engine, etc.

[rovr138]

Yes.

They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.

[darubedarob]

Gamedev engineering hours are also in endless oversupply thanks to myDreamCream brain.

[saghm]

I don't think it's quite that simple. The reason they had such a large install size in the first place was due to concern about the load times for players using HDDs instead of SSDs; duplicating the data was intended to be a way to avoid making some players load into levels much more slowly than others (which in an online multiplayer game would potentially have repercussions for other players as well). The link you give mentions that this was based on flawed data (although it's somewhat light on those details), but that's means the actual cause was a combination of a technical mistake and the presence of care for user experience, just not the experience of the majority at the expense of the smaller but not insignificant minority. There's certainly room for argument about whether this was the correct judgement call to make or that they should have been better at recognizing their data was flawed, but it doesn't really seem like it fits the trends of devs not giving a shit about user experience. If making perfect judgement calls and never having flawed data is the bar for proving you care about users, we might as well just give up on the idea that any companies will ever reach it.

[godelski]

How about GitHub actions with safe sleep that took over a year to accept a trivial PR that fixed a bug that caused actions to hang forever because someone forgot that you need <= instead of == in a counter...

Though in this case GitHub wasn't bearing the cost, it was gaining a profit...

https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792

[kibwen]

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.

I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here.

AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made.