this patch probably contains not only code, but a slew of texture, audio and other changes. but not 22gb worth of changes.

* if tl;dr on below, see next asterisk

I think some delta / packaging / distribution failure keeps happening but it's not enough for larian to take action yet. larian uses it's own packaging file system (pak files) as they did for DOS2 ... instead of distributing deltas of these files (it looks like) they're just replacing them. minor changes to the files within are managed in such a way that they 'require' the entire package (pak file) to be redistributed over GOG. I assume steam's depot update file delta system does a better job handling these sorts of changes?

now as a software arch / dev, I can tell you that in most cases (and in particular this exact sort of case with a large software product) code changes are never a significant percentage of a change set (e.g. a large code change would be hundreds of megabytes at very most, assuming really bizzare templated / unrolled code / major refactoring of external scripting) ... I'm betting it's 2-10mb compiled code change and the rest (~200mb) is gui textures and associated components (animations, ux descriptors, audio queues) and external script changes are probably in the kilobytes.

the reason code changes are generally a fraction of the size of game updates is because in most cases people have to physically write the code; they can't just generate huge logic trees (like AI can) or paint swaths of code (like an artist). most of the code that changes does the same thing but is written better, is more readable, documented better, has better safeguards, has verbose scenario-specific performance optimizations, and of the code that's brand new it generally reuses or shares some code with existing components.

for relevant evidence that code changes are not 'big,' the linux kernel is 27.8 million lines of code, tens of millions of lines change between major versions. depending on the configuration, a compiled linux kernel is between 300KB and 100MB (all debug symbols, all devices baked in, kitchen sink config) with the average being about 12MB at present and a binary delta between major versions will give you about 20% (60KB to 20MB, 2MB avg). the biggest delta are generally in the binary blobs portion of the kernel; it consists mostly of added generated tables for hash algos and firmware images. it's still "small."

for videogames like this, there's 2 major code change size factors to consider; (1) code compiled in the executable and libraries and (2) external code (aka scripts) that exist standalone or inside the proprietary larian packages. the external code is possibly larger by an order of magnitude but it's still relatively tiny compared to textures, models and audio. compiled code can possibly be larger than the entire linux kernel because compiler optimizations are probably stressed to unroll and specialize to squeeze out any performance that can be had from doing so. heck it might even have a bunch of debug symbols baked in too; they need their verbose stack traces in bug reports. that still shouldn't break 200mb uncompressed but even assuming complete incompetence it'd be a stretch to reach a 1gb code delta.

as an aside, always disappointed to see people try to suppress discussion or appologise for someone else on a topic they don't understand; whether politics, religion or fricken video game content. it's easy to supress, easy to assume you understand. I get it, been on that side of the boat. take a step back and think about if you're being dismissive of or supporting a person or idea or whatev by assumption or experience and establish some facts and figures, don't fall victim of the info gap. we live in the age of misinformation, anecdotes, fallacies and brainworms.

* tl;dr:

definitely complain to larian. there's binary differencing schemes that are cheap (even free) and easy to employ for patching that would save us all some bandwidth and patch unpack/install time. tbh not sure why gog doesn't force the use of such things. 22 GB is a pretty incompetent footprint for this set of changes.


just checked... the binary delta of the changes between this and the previous is 1-2mb. ffs.