Some Call of Duty discs contain basically no data at all.
>Game disc only contains 1GB of data (In some regions it has even less data on disc) forcing you to download a 40+GB patch (at launch) and another 40GB of data packs in order to play the game.
That is a nice site. I was first made aware of this issue with Switch games. Some publishers will cut content on the memory card and force a download to stop their game requiring a card with larger capacity which costs more.
These aren't even new games that it is reasonable to expect to be patched. Re-releases like "Spyro Reignited Trilogy" require a download which is just a cost saving exercise.
It’s also an plausible anti-leaks measure - if the gamecard contains everything needed to play the game, the game can easily leak early when the cards are going to retail.
If a day1 patch is required, then it can’t leak until that patch is available?
I wonder how many publishers use S3 for this. Because, at current retail (quantity 1) prices, a bigger card looks like it will pay for itself after a whopping two downloads.
I assume that the game downloading ecosystem uses something that’s actually cost-effective. At AWS prices, it seems like it would be basically impossible to be a profitable publisher of multi-gigabyte games at any scale.
That also has the effect of preventing pre-release leaks, though as we've seen some of Nintendo's own games shared on the internet weeks before release I don't imagine it's a big part of the reason for requiring a download.
Since figuring THAT out might require reading the whole disk and doing byte by byte comparisons (or a whole disk checksum), easier to just download the whole thing.
Unless they track literally every single DVD variant perfectly, which ain’t happening.
And that is ignoring that many disks are basically just a hardware license dongle, and don’t actually have a full playable version of the game.
It’s an info theory thing. But nice try. Why don’t you propose something better? Besides what I already proposed anyway.
The ways to optimize/‘solve it’ all require degrees of rigor in information control and tracking that aren’t realistic given the market conditions and supply chains.
At least unless people stop being okay with paying for $40+ games that download 40G patches anyway. Which would require severe changes in trajectory of bandwidth availability, which isn’t likely.
No sir, excuse my bluntness but you are full of shit trying to claim that information theory blocks this from being practical. I worked on stuff like this. I worked on the format that Windows setup uses for installation media for example. It has delta patches too. I think the same exact idea used there would work. It has a hash of every file precomputed and only stores what's unique.
HN rated limiting sucks. And client crashes suck more.
You’re not reading my comment, or thinking about the game distribution problem.
MS can get benefit from reading all the files, verifying hashes, etc.
And in a typical OS update scenario, MS can trust that a files contents haven’t been updated since the hash was checked. Which reading from a DVD/BluRAY, scratches are a problem and it isn’t that simple.
Games typically don’t, especially those on a DVD or BluRAY. Because they are slow, and have terrible seek times.
So, like I pointed out - it doesn’t make sense to do the work you need to do in info theory to actually apply a delta patch in these scenarios.
I mean, zsync? Performing simple hashes of blocks of data isn’t exactly hard for the console. On the CDN side, just add a caching layer for the resulting chunks and it should sort itself out, since there are only so many variants of the source disc. It won’t get you the best compression ratios, but it’s flexible. We were considering this for firmware updates of an IoT product. It’s not like differential updates are unheard of.
For that sync to work, you have to read the whole disk, do hashes, then compare to hashes for a given other version. Which requires reading the DVD/BluRAY (slow) and comparing to the versions on the server.
And preferably, if you’re just reading hashes off the disk, that none of the actual data on the disk is corrupted or doesn’t match the hashes.
And then, due to the reality of the way games are distributed, downloading 90%+ of the game anyway.
Or just download the full version, which is simpler and likely the same amount of bandwidth, and faster since you’re not having to read/check the slow disks for more than basic ‘is it this game’ checking.
Are delta patches still viable given the current sizes of games? I'm not sure if this is the state of the art, but according to https://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/, bspatch would require more memory than most systems can offer.
I'd expect the patch generation to be memory hungry, not the patch aplication, which should be only data and offsets. If it uses maximum compression it might generate a huge data dictionary, but since it has to be distributed too, that would be contraproducent to patch size.
The patch download shows up as a download once you put a disc in for installation. The console still installs from disc and you can usually play without the patch. I actually had a game that failed to install from disc, the replacement disc worked fine. So unless this is something very recent I have no idea why an internet connection would have an impact on disc installations.
Some of us have *really* slow internet connections, such that the much smaller day one patch is still going to take a quite long time to download. Much longer than the full installation from disc.