Update only the files that are needed, not entire game.

PLEASE explain why we have to download the entire 20+ meg game every update instead of a smaller patch that fixes just the files that were changed? This would save everyone a load of time and bandwidth if you released a full install separately from a smaller file sized update patch.

Thanks!

E

20Megs is tiny..some updates for EQII are in the Gig range.. I seens some 100Gig updates for other online games I play. I love the small, fast updates in SL.

20M in todays world is what, 2-5 minutes MAXIMUM to download? Not like dialup works well in SL, so can't imagine anyone using that to download the updates. Any decent DSL or cable internet connection can do that in minutes.

guess the point is, the auto update works, why not just auto update specific files that have been patched or what not... we all not the browser window itself is no 20MB... why drag us through a full download if your only updating say 2-3 files lets say... ive written a few program way back that were only 2-3 MB and had people bitc....(upset) because they had to grab the whole installer again.... i doubt that the connection speed has uch to do with it...

They will have to completely rebuild their application structure to pull that off.

But Philip once said, I think it was a reply to a townhall question, that if someone in-game had the knowhow to do it, they should contact LindenLabs.

I guess nobody did.

Download OmniPatch, I dunno if the original programmer would be interested in helping as he's busy enough, but basically it all it does is looks at the raw binary or hex code, finds any changed segments, notes their location in the original file, then stores that in a patch file.
It's likely slightly more complicated than that (as altered chunks will change the position of identical sections, so you'd have to count for that), but it allows for direct version to version upgrades (e.g 1.10.0 to 1.10.1, but not 1.9.0 to 1.10.1) with really small files.

Anyway, it doesn't require anything to do with application structure, it just looks at the two raw application package and builds a patch for that. You need to build a patch for each platform, and if you want backwards compatibility then you can build several patches for conversion between each version, or you force people more than one version out of date to download the whole new thing.

For something that comprises of several files, you would have to do this for each file, looking for deleted ones that will need removed, or new ones to add in.

But basically, it's actually not that hard at all. Even a half-assed attempt could probably build a fairly good program for it, if I knew how to get into the dirsty binary of a file then I'd do it, but I don't know how to do that, even in C.
But it's easily doable.

The underlying assumption in connecting to SL is a broadband connection. Sure, maybe there's some clever way to do differentials or something, but 20MB takes me about 30 seconds or so, and I'm done.

I guess it just isn't irritating to me. Depends on your service, I suppose.

There are third party solutions so I don't know why they do it. The updates aren't particularly large but it adds up for them (If 10MB is unchanged then thats a thousand GB of wasted bandwidth for the over 100,000 active users SL has) and it does hurt users on a slower connection due to the more frequent updates.

Yeah, I'm concerned about the masses of bandwidth that SL seems to waste as a whole, it slows the game down and can't be cheap for LL, meaning tier charges are probably higher than they need to be in order to compensate =(

Bandwidth is cheap and only getting cheaper..... The secondlife executable is 11MB alone so any patch is almost guarenteed to be at least that big.

Erm, since when? A small fix to SL could result in a patch as small as a few kilobytes. If a fix requires, say, edits to 20 lines of code, out of a program with 100,000 lines of code only a tiny patch is required.

Wasting bandwidth just because you can is complete idiocy, the fact that it's getting cheaper is an extremely poor excuse; the fact is that money is still being wasted, and so is performance. Every kbps of bandwidth wasted is an extra kbps that could have been used to send faster messages to the client and improve game speed. Same goes for the amount of redundant information the simulators seem to send to the client, textures that should have been cached but weren't or got lost for no apparent reason, things like that. For a growing game, every bit of bandwidth will count.

Not to mention the fact that updates are HELLISHLY annoying, sure it only takes a minute or two, but that's a minute or two people don't want to spend downloading something, especially when the updates come every week and leave the entire grid down for hours every time. LL's update policy/system seriously needs to change along with their development path.

Considering that the last update (and most updates before it) most probably needed that a certain 12Mb, a 6Mb, and a 26Mb file be changed it's a simpler (and safer) proposition to just download a new 25Mb installer.

I've been in other games where downloads are humungous (80Mb for just one of the files) and these games often enough had patching issues, missing files, bad files. Double jeopardy.

By comparison, SL is kind. 25Mb is a small download and a very small price to pay for zero patching problems.

At least we know that when there is a problem it's not in the patching.

Patching isn't a hard thing, try that Omnipatch link with something, assuming the program itself still runs correctly on newer operating systems (it was made for Windows 98 and Mac OS Classic, the Mac OS X port was done quickly iirc), it allows you to generate small patches for massive files where only a small amount has changed.



But how much of each file was actually changed? A few hundred kilobytes? That's all a patch file needs to contain plus instructions on which segment(s) need replacing with what.
As for safety, all that needs to be done is that a sensible archive of past versions is kept, say the last five version, so that patches from each of these can be made.
The auto-updater then looks at the user's version, if a patch is available from that version to the latest one, it downloads it, if not it downloads the full thing as normal.
If the patching program runs into problems (which it can check using checksums if need be) then the auto-updater can switch to download the full-version as well with a little warning message to let you know.
But unless a patching program has some glaring errors, it's not hard to make it as dependable as a full-download, all it does it goes through each file in a package, cataloguing new/removed files, storing the new ones and leaving an instruction to delete the removed one. It then goes through all other files and compares them essentially byte for byte and looks for any changes, notes where they are and what they were replaced with. Patch file is generated from this information and can be downloaded in a fraction of the time.

@Haravikk

The above is true but I can also understand LL's position. Really, 25Mb is tiny for a game by today's standards. On a dial-up, 25Mb? I won't really mind the wait. It will probably be done way before I'm finished reading the webcomics and news.

I do feel a large bit of comfort in knowing that the package that arrives is a complete set of files already known to work well. It downloads fast and among all my games it's the fastest and most trouble-free in installing.

If you make volume comparisons data transfer from in-world (all those prims, sounds and textures) will rack up 25Mb in no time.

It would be good too if they had a patcher version. But if they're skipping that in favor of devoting resources to bug fixes and improved features, then I'd rather they continue to do so because patching is a once in a while thing, as opposed to features that are active 24/7 in-world.

Deja vu...
73066

..and I notice once again no-one even considered the fact that not everyone has an unlimited amount of data transfer on their connection. I have to agree with Haravikk. This idea people are getting these days that just because the bandwidth is there that the amount of data doesn't matter any more, is getting a bit outta hand. There should always be consideration to try and reduce data transfer, just ask Strife, the optimisation king