[Launcher] What is Delta Merge, and why does it take so long?

Genuinely curious about this. I'm used to game patches mostly taking time for the raw download, and then maybe a fraction of that time to unpack or whatever. But AoC always seems to spend most of it's patching time with "Delta Merges".

Is this something completely unique to AoC, or am I just clueless and every game does a similar process (but not shown directly in the launcher)?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Pham

I found this, but not sure if relevant.. possibly only tangentially.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/18sr2k6/delta_merge_very_slow_for_small_amount_of_data/

VincentAMV

Apologies if this is necro-posting but I am not just experiencing that it's slow but it is continuesly running from 0 to 100% and then starting again specifically with the Delta Merge.

Download and File Operations were relatively fast but this makes it very hard to tell how much longer this needs to go on. On top of this I can't close it down without interrupting the patch so I risk having to wait all over again.

Is this expected behavior or is my patcher bugged?

SmileGurney

Leonerdo wrote: »

Genuinely curious about this. I'm used to game patches mostly taking time for the raw download, and then maybe a fraction of that time to unpack or whatever. But AoC always seems to spend most of it's patching time with "Delta Merges".

Is this something completely unique to AoC, or am I just clueless and every game does a similar process (but not shown directly in the launcher)?

Delta encoding is a way of storing and transmitting data in the form of differences (deltas) between sequential data rather than complete files. So if a small portion of a large file was changed, then this approach allows you to download that small part of the file instead of the whole file. Basically a method of saving end users download time, as file operations on a local drive are quicker than downloading a whole file.

Maybe someone with fresh memory of computer science concepts can correct me if I omitted something or got something very basic wrong.

Jenbuu

may be saving time downloading. but whats the point if you spend 3-4times longer installing the thing.
Patching the game take forever ive not got a slow computer and 500mb internet. it should not be this slow and resource intensive

SmileGurney

Jenbuu wrote: »

may be saving time downloading. but whats the point if you spend 3-4times longer installing the thing.
Patching the game take forever ive not got a slow computer and 500mb internet. it should not be this slow and resource intensive

Nah, disk operations are far quicker than network speeds

Child Item