What is it with the 22meg update?

What is it with the 22 meg update? Why can't you use a binary patching system?

Suggested way of doing it would be "check content hashes of all current content before running the patch; if anything doesn't match, download the full updater, else merely patch it".

SL doesnt have any content you dope. It's all streamed to you over the internet. Every single patch will be that size, and there are many of them. The patch is nothing compared to the amount of data you download while playing SL. In my case, it can add up to 5 or 7 gigabytes per month.

How can you be concerned about 22 MEGS?! That's like saying "Oh, boo hoo, gasoline costs fifty cents a gallon."

22MB isn't so small.

because you have to wait till the whole 22MB new version is downloaded. you can't even talk or read your messages etc. etc. before the client is installed. so I agree with Hunting!

You sniveling kids!
When I was your age all we had were 300 baud acoustic coupled modems!
I got more ram on my freaking video card than I had in my first 10 computers COMBINED!
We had to walk barefoot, over broken glass, in 3 feet of snow, uphill, BOTH ways for a single line of text and we were damned glad to get it!

You can do whatever you want while its downloading and installing. and 22 megs is nothing as far as a download on broadband.

I said you have to wait. You can do everything except play SL _and_ at my provider we have a bandwith limit (per month) and if you step over this limit you have to pay for the extra downloaded megabytes.

the main problem isn't that 22MB is big or not just not needed.
because the were not so many changes in the recent versions (I mean the slidebar change with the chat color for e.g.) those needed this amount of bytes.

LL can spend a few months working on and working out the bugs of a "better" patching system, or they can spend that time working on something that more than six people care about, like Havok 2 or better land-flag gathering tools in LSL.

I'm not so young as you think. I used to connect with an 1200bps modem (okay it's better than 300) to BBS and I'm using HSCSD and GPRS sometimes when I'm at my parents. so I know what is slow and what is the difference between the current broadbands and the old times.

there are some commercial (or maybe free?) binary patching systems on the market. so they don't have to develop it themselves.

Thanks for that, doctor. hahahaha

thank Linden lab to make you do forced pauses, during the 10 minutes the 22Mb download you can go do SOMETHING ELSE than computer games ^_^

I don't play so often. that's the other problem why I don't want to wait till the new version is on my hard drive.

Try to imagine: you payed for something. you have an half hour to play, meet your friends and maybe go for an event. but you have to wait for the sf. you have to calculate with this every time when you sit before SL because you play rarely.

How rude.

go play Horizons or Saga of Ryzom,
Then complain about the SL update.

or I can go out and play in a sandbox.

everybody can tell worse solutions. I would like to suggest better alternatives and not accept the acceptables.

ohh, I almost forget.

the binary patching thing could be experimental and fully unsupported in the beginning.

I tried to make binary patches today but because the installer uses packed data I failed.

I will try to make an another solution with the unpacked data - as my friend proposed.

I did find a 20+ meg update to fix the chat colors funny . but with broadband it wasn't really an inconvenience. Consider this, we complain about all the little tweaks they do when they should be working on the "real" problems. well implementing a patch system is not an easy thing when you didn't start with one. Besides, this falls into the category of "trivial" rather than "real" problems, so if they did spend time doing it we'd complain that it wasn't a valuable use of their bug fixing time.

as I said there are free and commercial products which could solve the problem.

It's still a highly trivial problem that could create more problems if they tried to fix it. So what if six people don't like downloading 22MB updates. Everyone else is happy.

Do you think that you'll download the full version instead of a 2MB update? I don't think so. But okay I close this thread on my side.

BTW: that's why I love open source, you have the chance to fix these kind of problems.

really? You polled them all and they all said so, did they? Well it pisses me off no end, so make that seven.

The last update was 22megs for one single solitary line of text in a status message. That's pathetic. And yes, if I were on a limited bandwidth account I would be pissed as hell about it. Especially since there's often a patch to patch the patch in the last patch all in the same week. There really is no excuse for making us download the whole client again every time.

Yes, to most people it's just another 22meg, but surely even with your blinkered view of the world and 'its fine for me so screw you' attitude to everything, Mole, you can actually see that other people might be a bit annoyed at downloading yet another 22meg every second time they play?

actually I have two friends who play second life and don't like to download the whole client. so the actual number is: 9.

Id prefer an update as well.. 1 minute is better then 5-10. But only if it does'nt cost a hundred person-hours to do

Alright, let me see if I can kill this with a few more detractors:

1. This requires resources (time, money) to implement, and it seems that LL currently has their hands tied.
   
2. Binary patching may not be as simple as you think. Have you ever tried it?
   
3. What about the problem that a user may have missed several updates? Especially with the speed of updates lately, it's quite possible a user could have skipped a month and need to go up 5 versions. This means they'd have to either include a full patch back to day 1 in the download so that the appropriate parts could be applied (think big patch file), the user would be required to download and apply patches in the right order (support NIGHTMARE), or the updater program would need to be written to detect the currently installed version and download and apply patches in order (possibly prone to failure, especially consider network outages... this would be a non-trivial program to write)
   
4. Think of the support issues. Binary patching might well introduce extremely weird problems in cases where the patching system fails. It will happen, things like this always do. This will be a bigger support burden, and will probably lead to problems not easy to diagnose. The fix? Download the full version.
   

Now, these are just four problems I can think of off the top of my head without even really trying that hard. LL has to anticipate all of these and all of the rest I didn't think about instantly; I'm sure there are plenty. They have to solve all of these problems and/or be prepared for the resulting issues that may arise. They have to do all of this while keeping the grid up and fixing the (long) list of bugs recently posted.

Is it any wonder this is a low priority, if it is one at all?

It's a great idea, but it's going to require a lot more careful consideration than you guys are implying. They cannot just download an open source binary patching utility and get this going tomorrow. You don't want them to try, it would be a mess.

That said, I vote LL consider trying this at some point in the future.