Thanks for the answers!
Yeah, the thing that I do find bothersome is the auto-updating - I didn't know Galaxy would do that, and didn't anticipate it since I hadn't actually added any games manually. It was only tiny updates this time, but I'd rather it asked me before installing anything major.
Aborting the updating procedure will not mess up the installation, though, will it? I did get some "do you really want to do this?" prompt so I took fright and just let the download finish. Sorry if this is painfully obvious...

They should be identical, but there could potentially be the odd glitch at times (such as a recent problem with Xenonauts). The biggest problems I've encountered using standalone installers with Galaxy so far (which is how I do almost all of my installations) are basically:

1) The standalone installer does not have Galaxy integration support built into it for a LARGE number of GOG games STILL even almost 2 years since Galaxy first became available. 2 years! Those games STILL need to be manually imported which usually works, but there are some games that don't work at all sometimes too. I've reported at least 2 of them to GOG and did manage to get them to fix them though. They've said the remaining games will get updated with the timeline being their infamous "soon". :)

2) As mentioned in my longer post above, installing a standalone installer that is not the current release of the game, whether you have the patch(es) for the game downloaded or not will cause Galaxy if it is running to step on your toes and begin to download the entire Internet. :)

Knowing the workarounds for some issues it is not too bad, but it can be pretty irritating to do it this way otherwise. :)

GOG's standalone installers eventually will all be updated to contain Galaxy integration support however currently many games do not. The games that do have Galaxy integration support will automatically inform Galaxy that they were just installed upon completion of the installation. This is built into the installer, where it invokes GalaxyClient.exe on its own with some commandline switches to inform Galaxy of the freshly installed game so that it will show up in Galaxy automatically. This will happen whether or not Galaxy client is currently running or not and there is no way that I'm aware of to tell it to not do this except not having Galaxy client installed. Galaxy will indeed automatically verify the games and sync them to fix any corruption as well as auto-updating them to the latest version by default.

There is no way to disable any of that currently, no way to configure it.

It is however possible to work around some of this if desired.

Always exit the Galaxy client completely before installing games via standalone installers. Before starting up Galaxy, go into the directory where the game was installed to and rename the file named "goggame*.info" by appending ".disabled" onto the end of it so that it has a different file extension. That way when Galaxy starts up and looks in the directory it will not find the .info file it requires and it will automatically remove the game from the list of installed games it knows about and will not look at it again after that. It will not update the game, and your game is essentially completely detached from Galaxy client. (I'm not sure whether or not Galaxy achievements and/or game time tracking will function with this, but I do not think so.)

With the current version of Galaxy client, no. There is an option shown in settings now for about 2 years to disable the auto-update feature but it is more or less in a seemingly permanent state of "under construction" like all of the other greyed out options teasing us that do not work. They really should just remove those options completely or implement them completely. Having unusable "options" that aren't options just acting as 1990's style "under construction" web graphics isn't terribly useful in a program and is quite frustrating. They claim that they will make auto-updates optional in the future but do not give any time estimate as to when that might be so all of this "optional" functionality may not be optional for 2-5 years in "GOG time(TM)". :)

So the only way to prevent a game from being auto-updated, is to make sure the client is NOT running, then detach the game from Galaxy by renaming or deleting the .info file (I recommend renaming). There MIGHT be a way to edit something in the registry perhaps on a per game basis but I still need to do more digging around in there to see if it can be sledgehammered.


Yes, with the .info file trick mentioned above. The .info file is a JSON config file Galaxy uses to learn about the game installation. If it isn't there or doesn't have the file name Galaxy expects, it wont find it and will treat the game as not being present, removing it from the list of games it is aware are installed.

Sadly, unless someone from GOG speaks up, or someone in the community has a better solution, the hacks I mention above are the only way to do it at the moment as ugly as they are. :o(

for it can not do anything, of course. Useless. British history is not made commissioner and women in Europe ahosloki UK

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What.

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Does Galaxy already support delta updates, ie. it downloads only those parts which need updating? If not, maybe that triggers Galaxy to redownload the whole game all over again, if it detects there is only one bit different in the installer imported version?

Yes and no... Galaxy can support delta updates and compression now, but it is only on a game by game basis for which they have enabled the feature from what I recall them saying. I think it is only available on select newer titles which receive frequent updates, but not yet enabled on most older titles. Perhaps someone from GOG could clarify that if they are reading this though.

I'm not certain what their non-delta update mechanism is but it has seemed like the algorithm works something like this by personal observation over time:

1) Scan subdirectory where game is installed and compute cryptographic hashes for all files found.
2) Request hash list from server for game.
3) Compare hash lists and if any hashes differ, proceed to download the entire Internet 5 times with no compression.

:oP

By clicking on More -> Settings on the game page you can set each game to update automatically or manually.

Thanks for the thorough explanation, that was very helpful :)
I'll do as you suggested and change the .info files. It would indeed be great if the "greyed out" features were actual features. As things stand now I don't really intend using Galaxy a whole lot either way, though. It may have some advantages, but as of now I don't have that much use for it (not having some sort of mandatory client was actually a plus for me, way back when I first joined Gog). But, to each their own, obviously, maybe I'm just a bit backward...


Thanks to you as well - I did realise you could change it on a per game basis, but I was hoping there was some "general" setting for Galaxy that would allow me to change its default behaviour (manual updating vs automatic updates).

Well, GOG still doesn't have a mandatory client so it's still a plus. :oP

Naw, there's nothing at all backward about not wanting or not liking gaming clients IMHO. Quite honestly I started out with that desire/way of thinking also. It really is a matter of personal needs, desires, weighing the pros and cons of conveniences (on either side of the decision). For myself, I prefer clients for their advantages but also prefer them to be optional. But, it's also nice to be able to do gaming completely independent of a client for a variety of reasons. I suppose I prefer both ultimately, but sort of favour having a client available and many of the features they provide. :)

Yeah, I really hope that they enable the ability to disable auto-updates globally soon. It gets in my way a lot. :)