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Ubisoft's Day-One Patch For 'The Division 2' on PS4 is 90 Gigabytes (eurogamer.net)
When The Division 2 launches on March 15th, PlayStation 4 owners will also need to download a day one update -- that's 90 gigabytes. Eurogamer reports:
That's according to a new official support page (as spotted by Game Informer) in which Ubisoft warns PS4 players who've opted to purchase The Division 2's physical edition that they should expect an 88-92 gigabyte download on launch day.... Ubisoft also notes that the the final HDD install size on PS4 will be between 88-92GB, for both the digital and disc versions. In other words, it sounds like physical owners are essentially being asked to download the entire game from scratch when release day comes.
The site jokes that when the game launches, PlayStation 4 owners "will have plenty of time to, say, read a book or learn a language or transcend entirely to another plane, while you wait for your download to complete."
The site jokes that when the game launches, PlayStation 4 owners "will have plenty of time to, say, read a book or learn a language or transcend entirely to another plane, while you wait for your download to complete."
Ideal patch: Just a handfull of file diffs and new files.
As implemented: Giant compressed .zip files to "save on data transmission" that requires the entire .zip to be downloaded.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And they just made the DVD with a download prompt so they could ship in time.
In any case, large patches on first day have been a norm for a while. 50 GBs is a lot for just a code patch. Game assets need to be downloaded. I cannot tell whether the game on the disk is complete as this is an online only game. The reason I tell you about this is because of the Tony Hawks game disaster. You had to download a large game patch even when playing solo as the disk only had a tutorial and maybe a little bit of the rest of the game. The disk was just like a demo.
Also, the first Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/18
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
They couldn't fit the 90GB game on a 50GB disc, so you have to download the whole thing.
Fuck that shit. If I were a gamer (I'm not) and I was told that after spending money on the game to have a physical copy, that before I could play the game I'd have to download the entire game because of a "patch", I'd be demanding my money back.
I've read comments on here, both in this story and others, that large "patches" have become the norm, but again, fuck that shit. A patch is a fraction of the size of the program.
If your "patch" is the same size, or larger, of the game, it's not a patch. It's a complete and total fuck up.
This reminds me of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5, where they rushed out the game because the license was about to end, and only finished the tutorial and park editor on the disc, with the entirety of the game finished by patch.
it's a space station.
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And why buy their games? I see "ubisoft" anywhere and I avoid it like the plague.
I heard they were going to be delivering the internets right to our door with a drone!
90 gb is 10 double-layer DVD's, or 2 blu-ray discs. There is No flipping way that that is all new content - someone didn't do a proper 'difference' patch.
Can't remember what the day one patch for Spider Man on the PS4 was, but I think it may have been nearly that large... it kind of makes you wonder if it's meant to help push you into buying games online since you are essentially downloading most of it anyway...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's funny is that the Unreal Engine, along with many other engines, have supported diff updates for a long time yet nobody utilizes them.
It's almost as if they were in bed with the telecom companies to make updates take so much fucking data so that they can effectively charge for that data once they go over-cap. Your steam library needs updating? My last update took 700GB, over fifteen games. Guess what most of those updates actually were? EULA updates. They literally made me redownload the entire goddamned game just for an EULA update. That makes ZERO sense unless they're getting paid to force ISP customers over their data caps or their programmers are just that fucking utterly incompetent. Either way, these companies should be sued for incurring us these charges.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They are not really "patch" they are complete re-download of the files, because apparently either out of lazyness or out of problem with console, they can't simply change a small part of the file with a diff path.
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Name one patch that MS has ever released that was bigger than the whole OS? Not even the Windows 10 service releases are as big as the OS is - and they are the biggest patches I've ever seen from them.
Before fat pipes I remember getting service packs for Windows NT on CD in the mail - those weren't as big as the OS either.
If they've had to change a lot of the content then a diff patch is going to be larger than the content you want to diff (diff patches generally have to contain some element of the original file for matching, plus what you want to change that to... sure, you can do it with indexes and offsets but that assumes that the entire world has one base version that you can refer to, and if you get it wrong you corrupt *everyone's* game).
How do you diff, say, a megatexture atlas which you've tweaked some of the dimensions to remove an unused image and repack the rest? Basically the diff for that is going to be as big, if not larger than, the file.
The executable is barely part of the size - likely it doesn't even make up a percentage of the game. But media, resources, models, textures do and they don't diff well at all (executables don't really, either, but at least they tend to be small enough to be practical).
Steam does have differential updating. But I still see gigabyte+ updates on a regular basis. Sometimes the impact of changing even a small thing (i.e. changing the compression on the textures to improve performance or avoid a licensing cost, which means changing the code, plus all of the texture atlases, plus re-optimising/recompressing everything) means it's easier to just put out the whole thing again.
We're not in Windows Update territory here, where someone issues a 500Mb update that includes a setup routine that installs an MSI then runs a .NET Framework update of every file, etc. etc. when they could just patch a single condition in a DLL... games are huge... 90Gb of which 89Gb is going to be content, media, video, models, textures, etc. etc. etc.
I've never installed Windows 7 with a CD, and I think normal versions take up more than 1.5GB in a DVD. It's like saying a 200MB patch for Ubuntu is enormous because you installed the system with a network installer that was 40MB only. Please, since Vista came out most of us installed Windows from DVDs. What you're talking about is not the usual upgrade nor something that happens often in SOs - and I use Ubuntu and Windows at home, Mac at work.
Yep, the absolute smallest Windows 7 install image is 1.5GB for the 32 bit version, more for the 64 bit version. Installation from multiple CDs is not supported. That's also a single language minimal version too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Incompetence is more likely. Once the game is released to manufacturing all the senior devs are moved on to the next one, with the more junior ones left to handle post-release patches and DLC.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
b) They've repacked all their data files rendering everything that went before as obsolete.
Either way it stinks.
idk about 'bigger than the entire OS', but MS Office 365 'patches' now redownload the entire Office suite. I recently found that out when I tried to install a language pack (you know, hyphenation and dictionary for Word, maybe 10 Mb in data). The damn installer removed my entire Office installation and reinstalled it.
Steam does have differential updating. But I still see gigabyte+ updates on a regular basis.
The main time I see this happening is when some game releases DLC. Rather than selectively install the DLC they pack it into their data files and inflict the download and footprint cost on everyone whether they want it or not.
For example Planet Coaster does this so the game is 2-3x the size on disk that it needs to be for most people with massive updates from time to time to compound the issue.
My monthly possible download is around 100 GB, and that's maxing out the connection so I can do nothing else in the meantime.
This is absolute bullshit and a clear assumption that everyone is sitting on uncapped fiber connections today. If you don't then your money clearly isn't good enough for this company.
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How do you diff, say, a megatexture atlas which you've tweaked some of the dimensions to remove an unused image and repack the rest?
You use the original file as a dictionary and designate the locations of each texture, with procedural instructions to reconstruct the output.
(i.e. changing the compression on the textures to improve performance or avoid a licensing cost, which means changing the code, plus all of the texture atlases, plus re-optimising/recompressing everything)
Now that one you need to reissue the files. You could theoretically write a deterministic decompress-compress procedure, though.
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The main time I see this happening is when some game releases DLC. Rather than selectively install the DLC they pack it into their data files and inflict the download and footprint cost on everyone whether they want it or not.
In a similar sense, I've frequently suggested they should profile or self-profile games and stream content.
Think about something like Breath of the Wild, 13 gigabytes. Do you need 13 gigabytes to play the opening scene?
When you start the game, the very first assets you need are identifiable. You can profile the loading screens and such, or you can speculatively identify assets by predicting what the next screen will load based on where menu entries go etc. and what assets (and code!) they call up.
So as soon as you turn it on, you have a list of things you need to get to a new game.
The same is true of starting a new game: you know what scene it calls into, and can download that. You can inspect the scene and see what assets it calls, and download those. You can speculatively-render: don't rasterize, but call out what assets would be used in the render, and identify what is visible and what is in the local scene but not visible. You can look for sector changes (doors) and scene changes (transitioning doors). You can look for events and movies.
You can project ahead and identify what you're going to need. Then, if you encounter something not loaded, you can pause and download it.
In development, you can profile this: you can speculatively load (with all assets available) and then have the profiler catch anything that was loaded but not used (load last) or used but not loaded (add to the forced speculation at this point). Developers can tweak the speculation to improve its base functionality.
Much of this already exists: the game loads up everything it needs into memory as you enter a scene (preloading), rather than streaming it off disk as it comes into the render view. We're mainly talking about leveraging that, but with a little look-ahead as to where you could end up immediately (what's the next room?).
You're coming within range of several shrines and dungeons. Grab their base assets.
You're getting closer to a particular shrine entrance. Prioritize its assets. Move those to the front of the queue.
You passed it and are now closer to some other entrance. Change the queue, download those assets instead.
Imagine: you buy the game and you're playing it 12 seconds later. It's going to take 18 hours to download, but you're getting 21% through it in the next 10 hours.
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Nearly every word in that article pissed me off, and I'm not even a console owner! Seriously, who are they making games for that can download a 'patch' that size? Is anything worth that hassle? Have they even heard of QA?
10 of these patches alone and you reach your monthly CAP on a COMCAST Cable model plan. 1,000 GB a Month doesn't cut it anymore with 90GB game and patches and 4K streams. But Comscam knows this.
It's possible for a game to stream data from both the optical drive and the hard-drive in parallel, improving reading throughput. GTA V did this. But most games do indeed seem to treat the disc as essentially a hard-to-copy auth token.
I wonder why they don't just press CDs. Much cheaper than shipping Blu-Rays, no?
I think WoW does this, it lets you play with just assets for the starting areas, then downloads the rest while you're grinding away
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