Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself

Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by pcwalton on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @12:54PM (#18451970)

One important issue is that if the patch program goes wrong, you can easily end up with customers having broken installations that you can't fix. The patching software is how you distribute updates, so it has to work. So there's strong incentive to deploy simple techniques with fewer failure modes as opposed to optimizing away every last byte of network traffic.

Firefox has historically shied away from complicated patch algorithms for this reason among others. (To be fair, of course, we're also dealing with several orders of magnitude less data than AAA games are...)

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by CydeWeys on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @01:35PM (#18452438)

If the patch doesn't apply cleanly, don't apply it. The command-line `patch` utility works just fine for this. Transactional updates with rollback on failure are a solved problem.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by kbenson on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @02:09PM (#18452840)

Is patch generally applied to resources I the multiple gigabyte range, very possibly with the original resource size exceeding the total amount of installed RAM in the system?

Patching small to moderate sized resources transactional ly might be a solved problem, but I imagine doing so on large resources in an acceptable time frame may not be for this use case.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by TeMPOraL on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:02PM (#18453916)

> Is patch generally applied to resources I the multiple gigabyte range, very possibly with the original resource size exceeding the total amount of installed RAM in the system?

That's where bundling all your data files into a single large archive bites you in the butt. Individual files the game uses ain't gonna be that large.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by Tehdasi on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:28PM (#18454143)

The reason why games have such large files is that the fastest way of loading a game is to do a serial read of the data, ergo the large files.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by kbenson on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:45PM (#18454307)

Sure, but now we're talking about game developers making choices based on distribution and patching instead of what they would likely view as more important considerations, such as performance and ease of development use.

Perhaps they could break stuff apart prior to shipping, but I imagine that could cause a lot of QA headaches as sure it should all work perfectly fine if a solution is used that transparently supports both combined and split formats, but who wants to bet the ship date of a multi-hundred million dollar project on that?

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by rob_fulwell on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:03AM (#18457893)

Welcome to the launch of the Xbox One.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by reaperducer on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @02:54PM (#18453248)

you can easily end up with customers having broken installations that you can't fix

I sometimes wonder if games were distributed on cartridge again if they would be more thoroughly tested before being released.

Plus, they'd load a brazillion times faster.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by tracker1 on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @03:35PM (#18453641)

TBH, I think that cartridges in this case could be replaced by USB thumb drive keys... effectively a 128GB USB drive with a hardware key, and maybe even an embedded OS. Updates download and apply into the Key. Take it with you, run on any common x86 system, it could be great.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by heimidal on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @03:07PM (#18453352)

Consumer expectations of scope, game length, release time tables, DLC, etc. have made this an impossibility.

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