Compression for HDD Optimization

Suggestions
1

Hello,
I have saved this game on quite a slow hdd that takes forever and causes that extreme stutter when loading the lobby for instance.
The reason for this must be that NTFS is very bad in quickly reading / writing many small files.

This is why I suggest you to compress the Tower Unite\Tower\Content folder or at least store them in big files, like other games do (look at GTA V’s game folder for example).
I don’t really know how to accomplish this efficiently in Unreal Engine, but I’m sure that you’ll find a way.

Everything shows me 73418 files (19.7 GB) in the Tower Unite\Tower folder.
This makes steam updates extremely slow, since Steam performs hash checks of downloaded files - and as you guessed it - it takes forever to hash so many small files.

I am not sure, but I think you could achieve that with unreal engine packaging (.pak files)?

2

this is already an opt-in beta that you can access in your properties on steam

6 Likes
3

You can read more about the PAK beta here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/394690/announcements/detail/1656671549920740713

2 Likes
4

I’ve just read the article and I noticed that the biggest problem would be the redownload after every update.
I personally don’t have any problem with that, because I have a fast internet connection (very unusual for Germany), but maybe you should split the pak file into chunks?:
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/591866/create-multi-pak-files.html

I can’t find much information about this feature, but maybe new updates will take place in a new pak file? I suggest you to test a bit with pak chunks.

5

With our current Unreal Engine version, we are unable to easily split content among several PAK files, without it being extremely time consuming and tedious.

This is something we’ll investigate later if/when we upgrade engines.

5 Likes
6

I know Workshop stuff may need a rework to upgrade engines, but I think in the long run it definitely sounds like it would be worth it, at least doing it eventually.

The effects, while I haven’t tested it, seem really drastic and most of the criticism of the game I have seen is about lobby loading times

7

Unfortunately it’s more like a complete rewrite. And we don’t know what other things will break (probably a ton). It takes us months to upgrade and halts development of everything else.

3 Likes
8

Dang, that sucks. Hopefully something can be worked out eventually