Can anyone explain to me what's up with the recent spate of "updates" that apparently don't change anything except for the size of the installer? At least, when I check the changelog on the GOG database, they're just listed as "Changed download size" -- and it's *always* an increase. Given that I don't have an infinite amount of space on my hard drive, I find unnecessary increases in file size annoying, and I don't bother to download the updated installers unless the changelog indicates that the update actually fixes problems with the game. But I'd really like to know what the point of the inflated file sizes is.

... ggaallllaaxxxyyyy.......

I presume we are talking about the classic installers which don't have the Galaxy-installer embedded.

The new installers could be opened with e.g. innoextract and check what exactly has changed, and whether the uncompressed files have the same or different size now. My two guesses would be:

1. All the new installers now include some extra dependencies which were not there before, like DirectX, VC++ something something etc.

2. For some reason GOG is just using less efficient compression nowadays, e.g. in order to speed up the installation time. Can you name some recent examples, especially where the size has increased a lot? I guess I could check with innoextract what the old and new installers have eaten (since I have some older installers still)

Not being able to make assumptions i don't see the dependencies being any different... UNLESS there's a specific version of them that works only on say Windows 10, like a .NET version of certain dependencies? Or making it Windows 10 compatible means having a few extra steps (like registry entries) that it has to update/add in the case it needs those? (though those types of entries would be very very very tiny...) That would make sense, Although decompression time i consider far less important than download time, and space saving more important. But then again we're in an age of 50GB games where some companies leave audio completely uncompressed because.... reasons.

But working with Slax, i can totally understand this. Having an OS compressed using LZMA compression was awesome in theory, but trying to run the damn thing took like 5 minutes to boot it up because the decompression overhead vs something like zlib which was more or less instant. Depends on what you're doing.

Though i'm also reminded of ToME, where a certain combination of re-compressing the archive files (some uncompressed vs others highly compressed) offered far better performance, and the best compression involved... a massive departure from the default method.

Confirmed by linuxvangog.

Though reports say there are slower install times too.

I have attached the changelog of one of those updates.

deleted

I hope so. That is, I don't have Galaxy installed, and when given a choice I always download the Galaxy-free installer, but all I know regarding the changes is what's listed in the changelogs on the GOG database. There are currently 23 games that have updates listed (it's been a couple of months since the last time I checked for updates), and I haven't yet taken the time to look up every one of them in the database, but the ones I've checked so far mostly just say "Changed download size" (the size increase is in the double-digits of MB). Anyhow, here's the complete list:

Eador Genesis, War for the Overworld, Age of Decadence, Freedom Force, Cities in Motion, 80 Days, Dreamfall, Dreamfall Chapters, Baldur's Gate EE, MouseCraft, Night of the Rabbit, 1954 Alcatraz, Age of Wonders 3, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Memoria, Warlords Battlecry 3, Democracy 3, Arcanum, Broken Sword 2, A New Beginning, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky

Any insight you could give would be greatly appreciated, given that I've never heard of innoextract, or LZMA compression, zlib, ToME, etc..

Room for the shovel and Facebook hooks.

Yeah, but it's not like 7-zip files can be packaged as self contained installable archives.

OH WAIT.

You don't even have to split the hair in 8. Inno Setup already has support for 7-Zip, which I'm sure will be update with the latest gimmicks soon, so it's just a matter of wanting to use it :).

Edit: Just read up on the issue and it seems it's a bit more complicated than that. Still, using zlib compression within the installer to then compress it with lzma2 is like shooting yourself in the leg... it may be more Galaxy-friendly in a unified build system kind of way, but still... I'm sure this could have been better designed.

which is why the installer doesn't do that :)

I wonder if it's more the ram to decompress that's an issue more than the speed... While i don't see anyone today using one of the installers with say less than 1Gb of ram, i've done compression jobs where it takes 2Gb to compress (single thread) and then it wants to decompress with 300Mb, or larger, simply the decompressor taking as much memory as it can.

But it does seem unlikely...
Mixing compression doesn't work well.

Going back to my ToME example earlier, i found if you just left the png's in the archives totally uncompressed, the entire installer could be cut IN HALF easily because LZMA compression does better than zlib, so you could then do a simple/superfast recompress of png files afterwards and get a better download/archive of the game (but you'd lack the install speed). But once something is encoded/compressed, it generally doesn't get any better on a new pass.

I should mention, in case it's relevant, that I'm running on 32-bit Windows OS.

That would certainly make a big difference.

7Zip is a lot like zlib and others where they are block compressed, so they put all the files into a block of memory and then compress it, unlike say zip files which compress per file (which makes it easy to delete/add files, but doesn't offer huge compression).

For a 32bit installer... I wonder what they assume for available ram (not including Virtual Memory).... I'd assume at least 2Gb but can't promise higher than that, and with a 2-4Gb limit...