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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."
And they just made the DVD with a download prompt so they could ship in time.
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.
It might be an update to optimize all of the textures in order to improve performance. Turns out Skyrim modders figured out that the textures were in an unoptimized format, and were able to make a mod that optimized them, improving performance and reducing file size, while keeping the quality identical. Optimization tends to come at the very end of development, so it's plausible they needed to replace every texture file in the game.
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it's a space station.
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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.
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.
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)
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It's a day one patch. There are no prior incremental patches, so this is just the diffs from the previous version.
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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