Bard's Tale IV - Released

The huge patch size is apparently how Steam chooses to do the patching now, where the patch requires as much room as the original game. Apparently Steam makes a copy, applies the patch, and then deletes the old files. The actual patch was like Joxer said roughly 5GB, but it required 52GB available space…

Might have been like that for a long time but I've never noticed it before since my SSD wasn't filled up.
 
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The huge patch size is apparently how Steam chooses to do the patching now, where the patch requires as much room as the original game. Apparently Steam makes a copy, applies the patch, and then deletes the old files. The actual was like Joxer said roughly 5GB, but it required 52GB available space…

Might have been like that for a long time but I've never noticed it before since my SSD wasn't filled up.

Seems a bit unnecessary. They know what the checksums for each file should be, and could easily download fresh copies of any that get corrupted. I don't see the point in keeping a temporary local backup of every file, and it's going to be a lot slower to write a copy of the whole lot than it would be to do a checksum scrub.
 
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Seems a bit unnecessary. They know what the checksums for each file should be, and could easily download fresh copies of any that get corrupted. I don't see the point in keeping a temporary local backup of every file, and it's going to be a lot slower to write a copy of the whole lot than it would be to do a checksum scrub.

Don't take my word for it as I might have misunderstood something, but I read it in a reply on the Inxile forum as to why the patch required so much free space.
 
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Don't take my word for it as I might have misunderstood something, but I read it in a reply on the Inxile forum as to why the patch required so much free space.

It might be true, and I just can't think of a reason for doing it. Making a full copy before performing operations is what you would do with unique user data, but just seems pointless for files that can be easily replaced. Perhaps I'm missing something.
 
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Weird, but I didn't notice anything of the sort with the patch. I had 36 GB free on my SSD and it patched just fine - 5.2 GB. Dunno, but that's what happened on my rig.
 
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It might be true, and I just can't think of a reason for doing it. Making a full copy before performing operations is what you would do with unique user data, but just seems pointless for files that can be easily replaced. Perhaps I'm missing something.

It is actually really interesting how Steam does it. What they do is they break up the whole game into 1MB chunks. When a developer uploads a new version of the game, Steam's Pipeline will analyze the new version and determine what 1MB chuncks have changed. Then Steam will upload all the changed chunks to the player. Also, if any chunk is identical to one or more other chunks then that chunk is only downloaded 1 time and then used multiple times in the patching process on the players PC. They use this system because it has cut down patch sizes. But, in order to make it work properly they had to make it so that it duplicates the game installation in a temporary area, apply the changed chunks, test it, and then have it replace the original installation.
 
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It is actually really interesting how Steam does it. What they do is they break up the whole game into 1MB chunks. When a developer uploads a new version of the game, Steam's Pipeline will analyze the new version and determine what 1MB chuncks have changed. Then Steam will upload all the changed chunks to the player. Also, if any chunk is identical to one or more other chunks then that chunk is only downloaded 1 time and then used multiple times in the patching process on the players PC. They use this system because it has cut down patch sizes. But, in order to make it work properly they had to make it so that it duplicates the game installation in a temporary area, apply the changed chunks, test it, and then have it replace the original installation.

That makes sense to me, to a point. I know that Steam uses a chunked system for creating deltas, and it would be necessary to create temporary copies of each file being patched in this way, which then replace the originals. But, I don't see why it would copy the entire game directory, including the files not being patched. Also, I would have thought that it could process one at a time, so that the disk space required would only be as large as the largest single file being patched. So I could see that a 10kb patch would require 5gb disk space, if it were patching a large 5gb asset archive file.

Are you sure that it makes a temporary copy of the whole game directory?
 
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The problem with this approach is that a small change in the middle can cause a massive re-upload - at least as described. A proper patch system might rewrite the full file on the host machine but the data transfer would be very small. Now it might be that they are doing something much more complicated than a 1mb chunk cmp; but i've gotten some pretty darn big updates for small changes.

It is actually really interesting how Steam does it. What they do is they break up the whole game into 1MB chunks. When a developer uploads a new version of the game, Steam's Pipeline will analyze the new version and determine what 1MB chuncks have changed. Then Steam will upload all the changed chunks to the player. Also, if any chunk is identical to one or more other chunks then that chunk is only downloaded 1 time and then used multiple times in the patching process on the players PC. They use this system because it has cut down patch sizes. But, in order to make it work properly they had to make it so that it duplicates the game installation in a temporary area, apply the changed chunks, test it, and then have it replace the original installation.
 
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