I did send a message about this to Judas earlier. Hopefully this change is not intentional & can be fixed/reversed

Let’s hope so. I can certainly say that your work has made many popular titles much more accessible to Linux users, and I’d be heartbroken to see that become impeded.

Could this be part of it? See post 6 - Question regarding the updated installers

Thiev did state they were migrating titles to a new structure. Are you seeing the changes only in games with Cloud Save or other Galaxy implementations, adam?

Good question. Will it be answered? Probably not. :(

Seriously, if things are like that, i can just as well look at those lists where games are listed that don't use SteamWorks, buy those, install them with their blasted client (of which I have to run the Windows version in WINE of course since it says *screw you* when I want to download a Windows game from inside Linux...) and then copy the folder and package it properly myself.

Until now, GOG was more user friendly in that regard.

This has been going on for a while, but it's only the installers posted yesterday that have started being obfuscated like this
I've downloaded & checked a few more of the updated installers, and it's not looking good :/

Obfuscated installers:

Aquanox
BloodRayne 2
Dark Fall: The Journal
Dark Fall 2: Lights Out
Eador: Genesis
Evil Genius
Expendable
Freedom Force
Judge Dredd - Dredd vs Death
Miasmata
Outcast 1.1
Sniper Elite
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

Not obfuscated:

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
Sacrifice
SimCity 4
Total Overdose

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/need-to-get-the-data-files-from-a-windows-game-on-steam-steamget-from-icculus-can-help.10345

Very interesting, I have just reposted this in #land_of_linux on the "Wing of GOG" Discord.
Icculus never stops. :)

On another note, since it is something concerning all WINE games regardless of version and wrapper:
Is there a way to force anisotropic filtering from the driver side through WINE?
It always ignores the driver's settings and I really want to have anisotropic filtering in "Mafia" via nvidia-settings for example. It would upgrade the graphics a lot.

I installed both the old and new versions of Freedom Force in two separate prefixes & compared the install logs. The old version installs the files directly, and there are lots of entries as you'd expect like e.g.:

2018-03-31 17:04:27.482 Dest filename: C:\Freedom Force\fforce.exe
2018-03-31 17:04:27.482 Time stamp of our file: 2015-11-06 12:07:04.000
2018-03-31 17:04:27.482 Installing the file.
2018-03-31 17:04:27.594 Successfully installed the file.

The new version "installs" the obfuscated files into a temp directory, but does not give any indication as to what was done with them afterwards to unpack the actual game files:

2018-03-31 17:06:12.703 Dest filename: C:\users\ad\Temp\is-II3SL.tmp\13\57\13572cce317bc4ef56349f7efaf19144
2018-03-31 17:06:12.703 Time stamp of our file: 2018-03-22 17:02:56.000
2018-03-31 17:06:12.703 Installing the file.
2018-03-31 17:06:12.703 Creating directory: C:\users\ad\Temp\is-II3SL.tmp\13
2018-03-31 17:06:12.703 Creating directory: C:\users\ad\Temp\is-II3SL.tmp\13\57
2018-03-31 17:06:12.705 Successfully installed the file.

(the new installer also creates a second install log but this doesn't give any clues either and appears to have been created after the game files have been fully unpacked)

I was initially wondering if this is due to a new InnoSetup version, but the new installers for Total Overdose, Sacrifice etc. are using the same version of InnoSetup and do not have this issue, so it's definitely looking like either a deliberate change or misconfiguration somewhere.

Not that I'm aware of, but it's not something I've looked into before

Just tried one of the new installers (tom clancy's rainbow six) and while it was installing I could walk to the kitchen (at the other end of our house) boil water & make coffee, and be back before it was installed (which is sad, since it's only a +-450mb installer)

No need for that: using the SteamCMD script you can choose whatever version (OS) you want to download. :)

All wrappers have been updated with a new winewrap.shlib again. This moves more functionality from the start scripts into it and includes some expanded features to make wrappers easier to create and maintain, adds more flexibility for future wrappers, some commenting, as well as a few more small fixes and general enhancements.

I was unable to update the wrapper for Freedom Force to use the new installer due to GOG now obfuscating the installer contents, so that wrapper still requires the old version. I suggest contacting support and asking for the old installer if you need it.

this looks like the way the contents is distributed via galaxy. if it is, it shouldn't be that hard to write a small python script to unpack that. there should be some manifest file somewhere that describes how the data chunks (with the md5 hash as filename) are mapped to the original files.

Yet another point against Galaxy if that is the case. Although there doesn't seem to be any manifest amongst the unpacked files at least.

This might explain the missing integrity check option from some of the newer installers though - the integrity check option would be redundant if it's checking every file as it's extracted, which would also explain why the new installers are so much slower than the old ones.

I agree. I came to GOG to support DRM free and clean installers. Luckily I had just downloaded and backed up all my GOG games (classic installers) to the NAS last weekend. I guess for now I am done updating any installer or buying GOG games until we know more of what is going on behind these changes, and if the Linux community can or wants to work around them.

I do think it is probably connected to Galaxy somehow, which should not be needed in the classic installers but may be being done 'for future implementation' and to avoid having two different installers (just nullifying the galaxy portion in the classic). My concern is if this is connected to Galaxy, GOG may be reluctant to do anything to change it.


Thank you for this tip! :)

Looks like the manifest is part of the install script:

Source: "{tmp}\0a\a7\0aa7e6ef2a032e4241e31a06e8f71aca"; DestDir: "{tmp}\0a\a7"; Check: "check_if_install('en-US#','32#64#','')"; BeforeInstall: "before_install('31a8d151bc8283d68dfa3f8aa8a5393a', 'fforce.exe', 1)"; AfterInstall: "after_install('31a8d151bc8283d68dfa3f8aa8a5393a', 1396866, 3375104)"; MinVersion: 0.0,5.0;