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Patch size...

Kloodge

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
I just downloaded the game yesterday and really like it so far. I go to log in today and there is a 680mb patch.

Is this typical? I'm on a limited Internet connection and it's $15 per gig if I go over my limit. I can handle that maybe once a week, but if it's going to be this big every time, I probably won't be able to play and will just hold off before I get too interested.
 

Rojjin

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
What's happening with this is that every minor code change to fix bugs crops up a problem in another section of code. not every patch will be like this and patches aren't usually every week (though the dev wants them to be)

this was a massive undertaking on bug fixing and MANY files were re-written/changed.. even 1 character change in a file results in a flag that makes the client re-download it.

This is not the norm, do not come to expect this (at least for the time being).

Edit: also if you just switched to the new windows client, it deleted and re-downloaded the entire game because the file location of the game was changed to allow it less restricted access, and enable features like internal web browsers that were previously being blocked
 

Citan

Project: Gorgon Developer
VIP
Stratics Veteran
I can't say what will be typical, unfortunately. This latest update was a little atypical because if you got the new launcher, it did re-download everything.

More generally, though, this is a problem because the patcher is pretty simple (a home-brew solution I wrote myself, because there isn't a good multi-platform patcher available). If a file in the game has changed since the last update, it downloads that file anew. And as Rojjin mentioned, if even one byte of the file has changed, the whole file gets downloaded again. (A fancier patcher would update only the portions of each file that changed, and I hope to implement that, but it's a ways away.)

This is compounded by how the Unity engine likes to put everything into a few huge files. This sucks for the patcher, because when I adjust the graphics of something, you end up needing to download a bunch of other graphics over again too, because they're in the same file. (There are ways around this, but they aren't very simple -- probably not simpler than writing a fancier patcher (which isn't easy either)).

So, bottom line is... I don't know. I would say the conservative way to bet is that there'll be a big update every week or two. Which may not fit your bandwidth budget, and I'm sorry about that!
 
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