[0.16.36-51] Upgrading deltas took longer than full download and fresh install

[luc]

(Reporting for a friend, so I can't tell you all the details, but it annoyed us so I figured I'd let you know about it.)

A friend of mine doesn't update regularly and in order to play together, we needed to patch it to the latest version, from 0.16.36 to 0.16.51. This took 50 minutes. Waiting to play, for 50 minutes, to run a few updates. I mean, I figured those patches (iirc they were mainly code changes, not media) would take a bit, like 5-10 minutes, but almost an hour?!

The full game is 820MB or something. The connection was reported as 12mbps by fast.com, though I am pretty sure it should be more (probably just a bad test). That should take 820/(12/8)/60 = 9.1 minutes to download, and then some time to install (maybe 10 minutes? Or 15? I don't remember how long it took when I installed it on their laptop, but I would remember if it was much longer than that). Total maybe 20-25 minutes. This patching took twice as long.

Since the size of the patches is known beforehand, the game can easily determine that the sum of updates is close to (or more than) the size of the full game, and decide to download the game fresh instead of making the player(s) wait twice as long as it should have taken. Or, alternatively, it should at least warn the player that it might take a particularly long time if you have more than X megabytes of patches pending.

[Loewchen]

This is expected, if you update several versions the size of the sum of the update files will be greater than a new installation, the fact that this could be improved does not make it a bug though.