Binary difference downloads

[DoctorMO]

For each upgrade to planeshift before it's final release there should be a binary diff made available to all those that still have the previous versions install, this would come with some MD5 hash checking to ensure everything goes well.

Unless perhaps the installed version should have updates a bit like WOW?

[DaveG]

Yes, that'd be nice.  'Course none of us have the damnedest clue how to do it. 

The way it's done now, it just MD5 scans everything.  (it's not even checking sizes first, which is a bit stupid)  We're working on better/faster ways to do all this, and hopefully we can eventually agree on something.

[hook]

As usual, free open source software offers an elegant solution. 

It's called XDelta and handles just that - (for those who know Linux/*NIX) it's just like a diff patch, only for binary files. Meaning you can just make a new client, make an XDelta diff for it and let the users just download that and patch the client with it.

Or even better!! Get the updater itself to use XDelta to patch between even major updates!

sourceforge project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xdelta
windows port: http://evanjones.ca/software/xdelta-win32.html

...it's magic 

[DaveG]

Not really worth it for executables.  Just redownloading the couple meg file is fine.  Would be nice, but not desperately needed.

[hook]

It'd make sense if there were big archives where there was just a small correction though (e.g. art zips).

Unless the archives (tarballs, zips, etc.) or other binary files are big there's not much point - I agree.

[Xordan]

Well binary diff patching is used by games such as oblivion for its patching. Basically it's good for when you have a 400mb "textures.obv" file which isn't easy for the public to extract (aka, you can't extract with winzip or something) It allows you to patch it without extracting it anywhere. The disadvantage of binary diff patching is that the patching process takes a _lot_ of time. A 1.27mb oblivion patch took 5-10 min to install. I suppose if the patching time offsets the downloading time so you save time overall, then great.