I remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet! The main story branches off into about 4 very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4.īack in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas. There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you significantly participate in them. Take for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. There are some cool side stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as one dimensional with only one purpose in life. The main quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a pathetic boss fight. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas.įallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. This is probably a very naive implementation of compression via de-duplication and should be obvious to anyone skilled in this form of art. The backend might also have de-duplication of the stored data as a bonus. However, in any event, that infrastructure allows for easily checking and upgrading / repairing to any version from any version at the expense of storing a small quantity of metadata and having full copies via the actual delivery service for segments on file. There are a couple different methods that might then be optimal depending on the desired outcome, which depend on disk space, operating system support for hard-linking/de-duplicating subsegments of a file, if the media is known to be an SSD or spinning rust, etc. First limited by filename and then optionally project wide, segments would be matched first checking size then checksum. The target version would then be selected and the target manifests collected. To update, the file size/checksum would be computed and the manifests obtained from the server these would be compared to the files on disk and invalid segments/files discarded. There will also be a list by size/hash that enumerates the segment lists within the file. A custom list might be provided by a resource packer that is aware of assets / code segments within the file.Ī website will provide an interface that has a list of file names to target size/hashes. If the file is smaller than 10x the base patch unit size: don't bother just add the whole file as a single unit / send it all for each update.Įlse: Create a manifest of the file: Size on Disk, Checksum of file, Name of file mapping to (one or more) list of segments within file by segment offset, segment size, segment checksum. The small percentage of people with the initial version have to download an extra 30-ish GB, but it saves you (as the developer) a bunch of testing time and risk. If you do only (2), which is what I suspect this is, then anyone downloading after its release just downloads the 54GB version. ![]() You also end up with an install base that is partially installed fresh (2) and partially patched (1) which means subsequent updates also have to test both scenarios - and if you had a bug in applying the patch, you have an even harder time later to try reconcile it for the same reason. ![]() If you are expecting that only a small percentage of your total install base has downloaded the base game (45GB), it also really doesn't make sense to produce both (1) and (2): You're incurring extra dev and testing time to produce a package that saves you a tiny fraction of your overall bandwidth usage. If you do only (1), anyone installing for the first time after the "patch" version is released is downloading an extra 9GB and going through a longer installation process. (2) Repackage the entire thing into a complete install (54GB) (1) Create a delta patch file that can be applied on top of the 45GB base version (20GB) Put another way, let's say the actual delta between original and "patch" version is 20GB (11GB new + some changed stuff). I have no basis for saying this (I have not ever worked in the game industry), but my guess would be that this "patch" is really just the complete version that happens to be 11GB larger (which is still significant, but much less than implying there's 54GB of additional content).
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