this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
1379 points (94.9% liked)
Gaming
3164 readers
292 users here now
!gaming is a community for gaming noobs through gaming aficionados. Unlike !games, we don’t take ourselves quite as serious. Shitposts and memes are welcome.
Our Rules:
1. Keep it civil.
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only.
2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry.
I should not need to explain this one.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month.
Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Logo uses joystick by liftarn
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Joking aside, when you download an update, many times it is completely replacing chunks of the game, not just a couple lines of code.
I mean, I understand when they chuck everything into a single file, but they used to know how to make their updaters unpack and replace only the stuff that needed updating, instead of just throwing the whole fucking file at you, redundancy be damned.
For instance, stuff in Quake 3 engine is kept in .pk3 files. You don't need to download the full, newest .pk3, you send a command to remove/replace files X, Y and Z within it and call it a day.
Yeah but then people go completely ballistic when games require you to install their own launches I don't think Steam would necessarily be able to handle the myriad of different formats that would be needed to make that work. So either you have custom lunches or you don't have particularly efficient patches.
I guess most people care more about the launcher.
That's because games don't need "their own launcher" to apply updates like that. Ask anyone that's been playing on PC, patches were these self extracting files or "mini installers" that you just needed to point to the installed game's folder. Even vanilla World of Warcraft let people download the patches for offline install, it even included a text with all the changes applied.
People don't want the fiddling on of that. I just want to be able to install the patch and then it be there.
That's why lunches are a thing there's no other reason to have them.
You might enjoy the technical solution but 99% of people don't care. I never understand why people seem to think that the 1% of the most experienced people are the standard when they are anything but. Most gamers build their own PCs, they don't want to have to understand about file systems and formats and compiling. They just wanted to work and then they want to play their game.