Why ur patches are SO big?

Wonder why they never fixed that. I remember this type of patching (basically just re-downloading large game archives) caused quite a ruckus when The Witcher 2 was released, in 2011.

Lately there’s been this tendency by game devs to just stuff everything in a few excessively large files rather than using smaller packages, leading to these huge downloads. This is, as far as I can tell, a choice on the part of the devs, rather than a limitation of the engine. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s certainly made the patching experience worse over the years.

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With Unreal its a bit of both.

Conan Exiles has 179 pak files. They could probably split those up (though I’d argue that’s quite a bit), but it would make their workflow more complicated. What would save us a few minutes to an hour of downloading could add more time to development time (and even more chances for bugs to creep in as devs are human beings).

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To be fair they seem to have added lots to admin panel as well also moved items around but there are things in there I’ve never seen and I spawn lots at least 60+ easy items I wonder for 3.0 as they said this and future patch would help prepare for 3.0 so yeah there would be higher downloading size till after 3.0 at least

Not everyone has high speed internet, or unlimited bandwidth though. Feels like that’s just assumed nowadays. Would likely be less of an issue if we weren’t forced to update, either.

Anyway, reading the docs:

During patching, the engine compares all the content post-cook to the originally released cooked content, and uses that to determine what is included in a patch. The smallest piece of content is a single package (like a .ulevel or .uasset), so if anything changes in a package then the entire package will be included in the patch. The method you use to get the patch’s PAK (.pak) file to the users will depend on your distribution platforms, but this procedure will allow you to create a much smaller PAK file that just contains the updated content.

Based on that it would seem there should not be a reason to download the whole pak again when a single asset within it changes. Given that the patches are almost the size of the game I’d assume there’s some room for optimisation left on the table. Being able to exclude the non-code assets would probably bring the size down to much more reasonable levels.

Then again, that’s just based on reading the docs, of course, not like I have any idea how stuff is structured internally.

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That’s because it is assumed unfortunately.

More specifically its assumed the user takes responsibility for their own situation. For example I could not afford to play any of my games on my mobile internet plan. I have to use my landline unlimited one.

If the latter wasn’t available, then I simply could not play Conan Exiles. My mobile plan couldn’t even download some of the mods in a single month.

Giving devs a free pass for something avoidable shouldn’t be a thing though, which it should be, based on the docs. I would have doubted anyone would complain about patches being brought down to sensible sizes, yet here we are.

I can’t speak for others in this thread, but I wasn’t complaining about anything here, much less patches being brought down to sensible sizes.

That being said, my personal opinion would be that there’s bigger fish to fry when it comes to work to be done on Conan Exiles. If they find the time to change their patching process without introducing a bunch of new bugs as a result, so much the better, but I won’t really shed any tears if they opt to do something else instead, like add a fun new feature :slight_smile:

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I’m still downloading. Colorado, USA. October 22, 2021.

(I want this on my gravestone.)

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Or its that… the amount of {censored} and complaining can be given a mathematical value, and that value is infinite and no matter what a developer does, there will be a train of people complaining and {censored} about something and tossing the “lazy dev” and “it should be so easy to do this” phrases around.

Maybe my professional biases are showing here since build pipelines (but not for games), streamlining processes, and basically anything else that results in more efficient development, and better software quality, are kind of my jam :wink:

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Hey I’m not new to this business myself, in fact I used to be that long-haired weirdo waiting around the mailbox for the Gold Masters. I even went to bat at Steam with the notion that this 60GB would be rolled up like it has for the last 4/5 patches.

My thought process is that this update made enough changes that a rollup was not possible, feasible or economically viable. In which case, we all do our thing, and new adopters download a new game.

Hey, I can totally identify with that. :smiley:

Build/CI/CD pipelines are always the things I miss the most when they aren’t there and the things I cuss at when they are there :grin:

It’s like having to choose between carrying everything in your hands or in a wheelbarrow with hexagonal wheels. You know it’s much harder to do it by hand, but can’t help wishing for those ideally round wheels…

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