File sizes will supposedly be much smaller. (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, September 08, 2020, 17:22 (1605 days ago) @ Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316)

Due to the SSD. Apparently a lot of space is taken up by duplicate files to get the games working with the HDDs in the 2013 consoles. I'm not a developer so I don't really fully understand how it works.

This was done on the discs… the seek time on optical media is glacially slow compared to an HDD. So they'd often have multiple copies of game files in multiple locations on the disc, so it could load large contiguous chunks at once. So like, the character model would be saved next to each piece of level data, so when the level is loaded it can just go on and load the model data too without seeking to a new section for example.

I wasn't aware they did this with HDDs, which have much faster seek times but maybe? Most games nowadays install to the HDD from the disc and don't run directly off the optical media. But that's the general principle of why they did that.