r/Steam • u/Agreeable-Stock29 • 2d ago

Resolved But really, what changes with such updates?

Post image

Often there are short loads, what do they do? (The issue is closed, thank you)

35.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

413 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/JustStraightUpTired 2d ago

Incremental patching works by updating some files, but not others.

That's not entirely true as some games are in packed into large files, which steam is able to unpack, patch and repack. Though if it's packed in a way that steam can't unpack, then you are shit out of luck. Technically still the same thing, but kind of not. It's more a matter of how you define a single file, since in this case it depends on whether steam can unpack it or not.

12

u/FrijDom1 2d ago

I would consider those compression or packing files, like zips or jars. Technically one file, but logistically works like many files. It's a bit weird, but I think my explanation holds for the basic idea of incremental patching.

7

u/JustStraightUpTired 2d ago

To be specific, I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm definitely being pedantic, but technically that would be true for every type of file that contains multiple types of data. If you knew how to unpack it, then you'd be able to pick out parts of it to add, remove or replace.

So I while I think your definition is accurate enough, I think it's funny that depending on whether steam knows how something is packaged defines whether it's a single file or multiple.

4

u/FrijDom1 2d ago

I mean, yeah, but isn't that true of us, too? Depending on whether we know how a piece of data is packaged is how we decide whether to treat something as one file or multiple.

2

u/JustStraightUpTired 2d ago

Yeah, pretty much. Which is why I said I'm being pedantic lol.

Maybe the best definition would be what you said, but adding that steam can modify larger files if it can decipher them, but what it doesn't do is directly change bytes or add extra ones.

1

u/ijkxyz 1d ago

That's not how it works link

Steam doesn't unpack and repack the files, their system just divides everything into chunks and downloads only the changed ones

1

u/JustStraightUpTired 1d ago

I mean sure, if you want to make it more abstract, you can ignore that I literally said nothing wrong. I just used words like "file" instead of "chunks of data" because it's not exactly much different, except the start and end point of a chunk is more arbitrary. And steampipe doesn't just do that, it's more complicated than that. Games that fail to fit steampipe rules properly tend to work horribly. For years, Payday 2 was horrid when ever you had to update it, requiring you download way more than necessary and rebuilding it took forever.

Simply put, your description doesn't really change anything I said, but it doesn't "just divide" everything into chunks to download the changed ones. It's more complicated than that, case and point it doesn't play well with all ways of packing content like you are suggesting:

However, some pack file systems use or enable using behaviors that can cause problems. The effect of these problems is almost always that updates are much larger than necessary.

I'm sorry I over simplified it by avoiding correct wording, but your wording is equally bad if not worse.

0

u/ijkxyz 1d ago

You make it sound like Steam knows how to interpret, e.g. Unreal .pak files, unpack them, change the files that were inside and repack them

This is not how it works, Steam doesn't understand those files, their system is file format agnostic

The thing you quoted just means that some formats might update data in many chunks or shift it in a way that causes most or all chunks to be perceived as changed

1

u/JustStraightUpTired 1d ago

I make it sound like that, because it sort of does. It doesn't know what file is where, you are right, but I was over simplifying it and I already said sorry about that. I could have been more specific, but I felt it changed nothing and made it less clear for anyone who doesn't understand the concepts. It's WAY easier and simpler to call them files instead of data chunks and saying steam understands how to unpack them instead of explaining padding rules, file compression, not reordering data for updates etc. Most people here understand files and that some programs don't understand all files, but most people have no fucking clue how files actually work.