Now if they can just update The Bard's Tale build on GOG to the remastered version that a lot of people keep asking for... there's already an up-to-date DRM-free build on the Humble Trove, so no idea why they can't just send that to GOG to udpate

It really isn't about fault, it is just how patching system works on GoG. The only thing GoG does for GoG Galaxy updates is simply upload what ever files have changed in the game to the player in a compressed format, that is it. So if the developers are having to make changes to the vast majority of the game files, then you are going to get vast majority of the games files uploaded to you in compressed format.

There isn't anything the developer can do about it because if they need to make changes to that many files to fix the game then they need to make those kinds of changes.

If GoG had a similar system to what Steam has, then the patch sizes would be significantly smaller, but GoG doesn't have that kind of system at all.


How exactly do you expect Inxile to make the patches smaller?

If you say so. This is the first game I've had to redownload 3 times, though, FYI.

They have been reaarranging their packed files for better loading times, and if you look through the game directory you will see the game files are packed in large files, which is an Unreal 4 engine thing. Because they have been reaaranging those things, it makes it so each of those files are changed, and GoG is going to have to upload to you all those changed files.

I saw the same thing happen with Hellblade and Seven: The Days Long Gone, both games being Unreal engine games. Everytime a patch was released, it was nearly the whole game was being re downloaded because of those pak files. Hellblade for example is 23GB game, with 19GB of that in one file, and each patch was that 19GB file uploaded to me from GoG in compressed format.

I'm assuming you're excluding Galaxy in that statement (re: updating games without GOG involvement)?

If practically all the game files are being changed resulting in these huge download sizes, how is Steam immune to this? What is this "genius" system they have whereby they seem to bypass having to serve altered files?

Ah, then they must be doing some sort of delta copying only updating the bits that have changed or something... as for Galaxy, I'm just glad SOMETHING exists to get updates as quick as Steam... most games I have installed in Galaxy get regular developer driven patches and they're usually small file size wise... I can live with whatever method they use right now, cause it's better than waiting for GOG to manually do everything on their end (I only use Galaxy and never use the offline installers)
It might be some form of delta copying... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_encoding#Delta_copying

The sharpness feature is reallly good to have, however, my framerate has dropped considerably and I can no longer play on ultra settings. It doesn't look as good as I had it with reshade either. I'm not sure what you guys did :/

I do appreciate all your hard work though, thank you.

I removed reshade and I think that fixed it - and, it does look really good now with in-game settings (no reshade). Thank you again!

Steam basically indexes a game down to 1MB chunks, looking at it in 1's and 0's. When a developer uploads a new build of the game it indexes the new build down to the 1MB chunks. It analyzes it and determines what 1MB chunks have changed, and then uploads to the player the new 1MB chunks. If there are any 1MB chunks that are the same as another 1MB chunk then Steam will only upload that 1MB chunk to the player and then apply it to all the spots that have changed that use that same 1MB chunk.

Where as with GoG, if a file changes, then it uploads the whole new file to the player in compressed format.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading

How do we confirm what patch/game version we have installed?

When you start up the game you should see in the top right corner a bunch of white letters/numbers.
The version of the game is 4.18.3-xxxxxx the x's change when ever there is an update. I am not at my computer so I can't see update 3 number, but update 2's numbers were
4.18.3-102451

Thank you. I found the options.

As it turns out I had not updated the game since I first installed at time of release.

If you want Patch 3 you will need to use GoG Galaxy because GoG has not updated the offline installers to Patch 3 yet, only to patch 2. Also they have not created offline patch installers, they just have to download the full game instead.