Factorio update times

[animagus_kitty]

The last time I tried to play Factorio, it was 16.16. It's now 16.36, which is great, right?
First, let me say that I'm a fan of the in-game updater. That's cool. However, when I need to download 20 versions, it's a little frustrating. I broke it twice, probably by alt-tabbing, and then the third time I'm not sure why the download stopped. When I start it back up again, I have to just wait for it to download .17 and then .18 and then .19...

Obviously, the solution is to just uninstall and reinstall, which is what I'm doing. If I was really in love with my saves, I'd have copied them. But I can't imagine that there's not a better way to do the download from the in-game prompt; why must it download each update individually, before overwriting each one with the version immediately following it? Uninstalling and reinstalling is both counter-intuitive and kind of weird, but the downloader apparently can't handle the pressure of downloading 20 updates. Either that, or my computer can't. Could go either way, honestly.

^_^

[Piroko]

I would like to counter this by saying that Factorio is still in beta and some hassles are kind of what I'm expecting

As for improving your situation - I believe you still can add your Factorio key to Steam to get a copy served through them that is automatically patched?

[animagus_kitty]

I would like to counter this by saying that Factorio is still in beta and some hassles are kind of what I'm expecting

I mean, I guess if I was expecting everything to be perfect, that would be silly. I do understand that sometimes, everything won't work 100%.
But I was just wondering if maybe there was a reason it downloaded each version individually, or if something could be done to speed that up for people like me who tend not to play for multiple versions.

I'm not 'mad' that it doesn't work, just a reasonable level of frustrated about long download times.
In potentially relevant news, Google Chrome is telling me there's a server error preventing me from downloading the game from Factorio.com. Guess I will have to add it to Steam--that probably is the easiest solution anyway.

[Piroko]

I would say that this is a problem that will solve itself come version 1.0 (1.0.54 to be precise ).

Maybe a quick and dirty fix would be to automatically download the full installer if that's (assumed) less time needed than patching the current version through several versions? Going through Steam is still the more comfortable solution though. Just remember to switch to the correct beta branch.

[Nebrot2k]

I think the issue is which version is published as "full update" and which one as "delta update".
If you played the 16.16 version it tells me that you have activated the experimental mode. And for players doing i hope is accepteable if the devs put the effort into bringing new features instead of publishing all as full update.

I assume that the non experimental updates will be muchg smoother.

[mrvn]

I would suggest that when the sum of incremental updates approaches or exceeds the size of a full download the updater should simply download the full version and skip the few files with user configuration when unpacking.