The issue with having a single format like .tar.gz would be that windows doesn't support it.

But having all the main files be in the normal bin forma they are in but then having a exe for windows than another installer for Linux and another for Mac would be a huge time and space saver for GoG while allowing users to just have a single installer that they don't have to redownload if they move from windfows 10/11 to Linux or dual boot or any of that. Just have it stored onto an external hard drive in a format they both can read.

I suggested Flatpak because I read it was supposed to be setup in a way that it would work on all forms of Linux. Having 3 installing launchers is doable and would only expand the size of the total installer by a few MB while removing a lot of repeating files and making it much less for GoG to organizer on their servers. But if it got to the point where they expanded to 6+ just dealing with all the flavors of Linux installers could get annoying.

While I have only dabbled with Linux, I do think they should have a few unified aspects between the different versions of them with one of them being an installer format that they all support that can actually handle a GUI.

Flatpak requires an entire runtime to be installed (which causes library redundancies), Snaps are cancer, so Appimage is the nearest to universal and install free; some people won't be pleased by them either.

And Windows does support Tar.gz, at least 11 does. It only took them several decades to get it natively supported. The Tar format has existed since 1979, so the onus has been waiting for Microsoft to finally implement a feature that was ready for most other computers back whence. (As always.)

Don't use Linux much past dabbling at the moment every so often just to figure it out some but the community should actually settle on a universal installer format with a GUI at this point, this isn't the 1990's anymore.

And with Windows, I know it can extract a Tar.gz but I haven't seen anything where it supports installing the contents. All it did last time I tried was just let me extract it to a folder which would be just fine if you had a portable application inside with a .exe and all but that isn't the case for most of these games.

But that assumes that the only difference between Windows, Linux and Mac games are the installers themselves, not he games they contain. Surely the games themselves are different. Assets may be the same, but some code and executable files would surely be different, so it would be up to each developer to build such a universal installer and ensure that only shared assets are stored in the bins. In the end it may be too much effort.

I was mainly thinking in regards where the shared assets like the levels, textures, sounds, etc that is shared between them all would reside in the bins as they would be used by all of them. While the operating system specific stuff resided in the installer itself for each system. Just as you described.

Didn't think it would require too much input from the developers at that point since they have already given DRM free and off-line installers.

Just take the files that were unique to that operating systems installs and include them in that operating systems installer.

Not a huge issue for the older games at all as GoG has actually had to resort to DOS emulators and all for many of them. Might be a huge issue for the newer games though as many of them want to install a million dependencies to go with them.

What I was trying to say is that it may not be obvious to GOG as to what files are shared and which ones are OS-Specific. Many games often use proprietary archives, so some random archive file may contain both shared assets and OS-related code, so all such archives would need to be split and the executable rewritten to account for the split, etc.

Thanks, voted. I never used the Downloader when it was still being offered, always just manually downloaded the installers. But for backup I'd love this.

That is news to me. If Galaxy is closed and you start the game directly from the execiutable Galaxy won't get started. Galaxy only starts if you use ome of those special shortcuts that GOG creates when they install a game with Galaxy or if you launch it yourself.

Yes, but easy to way to figure that out. Create an install for all 3 systems.

Now size/hash check every file in all of them, treat compressed archives as individual files.

All files that match in all 3 installs are put in the bins, any files where the hash is different or doesn't exist in the other installs is assigned to that systems installer.

May not be 100% efficient due to archives like you mentioned but it would 100% cover the content from all the systems with the only issues being outside dependencies or registry entries and the compressed files that are unique to each OS typically shouldn't be huge.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy still whit issues, 404 not found and stuck 92% in galaxy.

Just tried Blade of Darkness. Through Galaxy, it was stuck at 0.1 MB/s. Installers downloaded without issues.

Titan Quest Ragnarok part 1 is a 404 error.


This is NOT fixed.

GOG support actually replied to my ticket rather quickly.
(5 hours ago I had asked about 4 missing offline installers / files).
Their reply: I'm okay with that. *thumbs-up*

You got reply back on a weekend? Is the world coming end soon? jk

nvm, it's still out