The game's software architecture

So here I am, looking at a 105 GB update. And I’m looking at it, with horror, from the downstream end of a 3 Mb DSL connection which will take probably considerably more than 24 hours to complete. When I installed it originally, I seem to remember that the download took about full two days, and this is approximately that size.

Which leads me to a question, if anyone here happens to have an opinion or an answer. As a software dev myself, I’m accustomed to developing applications whose functionality is distributed over a number of files (dynamic load libraries, or DLLs, in my case), each provisioning a separate aspect of the app’s logic: a database interface, one or more UI interface components, data modeling, etc., etc. So if I do some fixes in one or more of those domains I only have to publish the files I’ve made changes in. NOT the entire application.

An alternative is a monolithic application, distributed in a single disk file of perhaps enormous size. A fix, no matter how small or limited, requires the entire file to be published, no matter how few bits have been changed. And it looks to me like FH5 must be of that architecture.

Comments?

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Have you ever played Jenga?

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Not sure what the issue is. My update downloaded and installed in about 15 minutes. No idea what the size was. I just left my PC updating while I went and had breakfast. Came back 15 minutes later and my PC dinged that it was all done.

@PandemicBow2072, what’s your download bandwidth?

Fibre 300mb/s.

best comment this complaint could hope for lol, I prefer connect 4 myself

I believe that alongside bug fixes and new additions the devs pushed future assets for the game, not so sure about the upcoming expansion 1 since they said there’s no news on it. However, it is a possibility so that way they won’t push out a 20GB update latter (which I doubt). And some games are compiled strangely having rather large file “cabinets” which are single files reaching multiple gigabytes which may be the case for FH5 PC version. The smallest change would alter this cabinet’s version, and since it’s under a single file it will redownload the entire file. Also, considering how rushed the game was published, it still may have some junk files that weren’t properly cleaned up before. But my main guess is that the drift club story affected the update size with its videos and voices, majorly the cutscenes in general.

The file size it displays is a bug. It’s not a 105 GB download. It finishes quite quickly.

Was a little over 9 GB for me.

It’s a 9GB update that thinks its a 105GB Update. The bug might be Microsoft side.

What part of world is stuck at 3 Mbps (300KB/s)?
Are you sure you don’t have faster connection available?

It’s 300 megabits per second not 3 megabits per second. Just run a speed test and got 308 mb/s.

@ArcticInsanity, no third world here, but I live out in a rural area in northwest Washington state, in a small area that’s served only by CenturyLink with what they call ‘legacy’ hardware. The highest speed available to me is 3Mb download, 400Kb upload, and it’s unreliable to boot. Nearer the city, people are on cable, but out here this is all I can get. Satellite internet would be available, but we’re down behind a screen of tall cedar and fir trees, up to a hundred feet tall, and the HughesNet satellites sit only about 25 degrees above the horizon, well behind that screen of trees. So I can’t get sight lines to them, and can’t cut the trees down (wouldn’t, even if I could).

The federal government’s rural broadband initiative is beginning to give some grants to the local PUD for fiber, but I won’t see it here until 2023 and perhaps later.

BTW, that download finished overnight, and the game was ready to play by this morning.

File size/count has nothing to do with software architecture. E.g. Windows, Linux, MacOS, Kubernetes can all be downloaded as a single file

@uhFraid - don’t actually know much about software architecture, do you?

try living in Scotland - in rural areas we’re lucky to get 5 Mbps

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Move to New Zealand. Internet here is super fast, not capped and reasonably priced. But everything else is expensive :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.