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A Nine-Hundred Megabyte Patch?
captainzhei
Member Posts: 203 Arc User
I saw the patch notes. There can't possibly be nine hundred megabytes worth of changes. Why are the patches always GIGANTIC? 900 Megabytes couldn't possibly account for all of the Winter Wonderland additions either, since the library of game info probably arrived with the wonderland patch from last year (or the year before).
I'm not saying "Don't fix stuff", but I would like to feel like the money I'm spending on this limited bandwidth (thank you Canadian Radio and Television Commission) isn't being wasted on an unnecessarily bloated patch.
Perhaps to speed up the patching process, you guys could look into an addition to the launcher that can gather the patch data in the hours before the server comes down for maintenance. That way, when the server is up again, all us players would need to do is open the game and let it install the patch data locally - rather than have to wait up to an hour before I'm even glimpsing the chance of getting into the game.
I'm not saying "Don't fix stuff", but I would like to feel like the money I'm spending on this limited bandwidth (thank you Canadian Radio and Television Commission) isn't being wasted on an unnecessarily bloated patch.
Perhaps to speed up the patching process, you guys could look into an addition to the launcher that can gather the patch data in the hours before the server comes down for maintenance. That way, when the server is up again, all us players would need to do is open the game and let it install the patch data locally - rather than have to wait up to an hour before I'm even glimpsing the chance of getting into the game.
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Captaincy, Excelsior-Class U.S.S. Bianca Beauchamp NCC-99947-F
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Captaincy, Excelsior-Class U.S.S. Bianca Beauchamp NCC-99947-F
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by captainzhei on
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What you are asking for is either "patch Tribble" or "start loading the patch before the maintenance is over".
That's bull. This community complains viciously about absolutely everything. I would go as far as to call it "b*tching and whining", mainly because people don't offer even a hint of a solution to their greivance and they do a lot of insulting and sarcasm.
I just wanna play, and right now I can't. There's this big heavy patch I can't explain squeezing the life out of my poor-man's internet.
Captaincy, Excelsior-Class U.S.S. Bianca Beauchamp NCC-99947-F
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I am sorry you have poor-man's internet, but that is just the way it is. You cannot add new maps into your computer via magic. Your hour is wasted waiting. It happens to everyone at different times.
lets say "all" of your ship textures and geometry are in ONE pretty big file, say, I dunno, 200MB. You add a new ship, its now 201MB but the *file* used by the *engine* is the whole thing. Sometimes, you can edit the file and append the new data to it. Sometimes, though, there is no way around it, you must resend the file entirely.
Things like that across the board, but mostly in the graphics and audio areas, can make a big file from a small change. It happens.
I won't go into how modern programmers waste space like mad nor the theory of time-space tradeoffs, but sometimes it is easier to make a bigger file than a smaller one when developing software, and sometimes a larger, wasteful file can outperform a size-optimal storage by a significant amount.
I can't tell you exactly what went on here today, but it is not unreasonable to get a big patch now and then in the modern world of software development. Go stretch your legs for 5-10 min... time you read this reply your patch should have arrived.
Received = Y
Patched = ~1556
Received = ~50
Are you complaining about a Patched = ~900 or a Received = ~900?
9 gigs would be 9,000 megabytes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk
Well ¿do you can offer a hint or solution about how fix the patch size? because if not, you are, just like you did said "b*tching and whining" so... welcome to the jungle.
GG Cryptic.
dnirg eht nioj
I was just about to post this, good to see someone else understands how it works. Sometimes there is jut no way around it, games like this are made up of large files and often times patching those files means replacing the old large file with a new large file.
As said before, 900 Megs is not 9 Gigs, it's .9 Gigs. 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.
And as for who still uses the term 'Megabyte.' Absolutely everyone except you.
@noroblad Thankyou for offering that tidbit. I'm so used to playing offline games that the massive containers used in MMOs (I'm assuming to limit or prevent someone from hacking the game easily to make a private server version? I have no idea) didn't even occur to me. (And my connection offers me about a reliable 100kbps, so it's definitely not showing up in ten minutes.)
@cervantx My original post offered a suggestion of preloading patch data before the maintenance cycle, letting people download it early, so that they're less likely to be stuck still downloading when it comes back. Since any other way would be a disaster of re-programming, that really is the most efficient way of delivering the content with the lowest delay for the consumer.
Also, my original post wasn't b*tching, it was filing a greivance. It wasn't rude, crude, accusatory or meant to rile anyone up. I even offered a logical possibility to solve the situation, based on my own limited knowledge of programming. But thanks for being observant.
@aoax10 I have on-demand patching turned on, so I don't patch anything the game doesn't consider essential. It keeps my download sizes smaller because I'm broke and can't pay for top tier internet.
Captaincy, Excelsior-Class U.S.S. Bianca Beauchamp NCC-99947-F
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I may be spoiled. It was what others said, 1.5 gb ... took under 10 min for me, I get between 3-4 megabytes /sec. And I don't have to deal with communistcast anymore ... best money I ever spent.
Containers vary in implementation and purpose. For example, they could just be a dumb dump of images wadded up in one big file and indexed, which is both easier to manage than 1000000 small files and more efficient (loading 1 file is less work than loading thousands) or any of a dozen other things. Or a big file could be really a full database, like all the items in the game with stats, icons, and all sorts of other data fields.
Making a server would take more than hacking the client. Most of the security features are in place to prevent modification of the game to cheat. One famous example in WOW featured a dungeon that was basically a downward spiral. One enterprising hacker and his guild took out the floor in the dungeon file so they could fall directly to the final boss for quick loot. I do believe the entire guild was banned, but those sorts of hacks are more likely. The server does completely different things from the client and would require both the client (hack the destination server IP and many other things) and the server side software (likely an engine that does not have any graphics at all, might be in a gui or even just a text program) to reproduce a working system. We don't have the server software, and making it up from scratch would be beyond hacking, it would be full on development of a new server side application entirely! (The sheer amount of reverse engineering involved here lets me feel comfortable with talking about this type of activity. I will not however discuss more viable "hacks", cheats, or gross violations of the TOS here).
There are a million other reasons to do things one way or the other.
Even single player games have large files. DOOM for example use just a few files for the whole game, their own format called "wad" which literally was a big gob of game data all in a massive file. It was one of the first PC games to go from many, many small files to a few large files... because around that time (16 to 32 bit era) the limits on file sizes were growing and moving from floppy to CD etc ... there was no longer an issue with big files. On a 16 bit system, for example, the largest file you can index cleanly on the native hardware is only 65KB (2^16). On 32 bit machines, that goes to 4 gig. And if you recall there were limits on some 32 bit systems that incorporated that number --- for example many systems COULD NOT seat more than 4gb of ram NOR store a file that was larger than 4gb on the disk. (and 2^64th is beyond belief in size. 1.8x10^19 approximately ... thats 1.8*10^10 GIG..)