Yeah the LARGE installers are kinda going downhill, now in my personal experience the sub 2gb sized games perform fine, but any higher and you will be waiting a bit.

Its getting fucking annoying personally

GET IT TOGETHER GOG

(yes Darvond a rare time where I agree with you, build a monument lol)

Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft...

Might as well close up shop and shutter the site then.

?????

It's Civ IV, it doesn't have voice packs I don't need.
Log initializes at 02:06:13.082, it hits 90% around 03:52:27.704, and finishes at 04:10:25.129.

It seems to be with certain games. Civ 4 definitely takes long time to install for me, but a game like Evil within 2 installs in shorter time.

Well, I'm glad I'm not completely insane, even if the time to complete was. I wonder if the Civ IV installer was built wrong?

I was giving general advise for backing up a game from GOG.

I have no idea about Civ specifically.

But for modern games the download size can be tens of gigs less via galaxy than via an offline installer.

I suggest you wake up to the fact you are angry at the wrong thing :)

A delay in an app's startup is not due to galaxy but to that app. If it were due to galaxy it would happen to every app and it does not. GOG is not going to fix some other developer's game.

Maybe. I'm one of those weirdos that install hundreds of GOG games on my PC. So I came across couple of games that take a long time to install, but we're small in size.

AI Wars 2 use to take forever to install. After some updates the game seems to install fast now.

No he isn't wrong at all. Read the thread I posted in post 2, you'll see a GOG developer confirmed the Galaxy API wrapper bug. They added a workaround allowing you to reduce the startup delay to 1s by editing a line in GalaxyConfig.json file, but that only works for new +2024 games. Dozens to hundreds of 2018-2023 games that have had a bad Galaxy timeout "hardcoded" into the game remain unfixed.

Edit: It doesn't affect all titles because GOG don't use the wrapper on all titles. The whole reason the "Ghost wrapper" exists is to allow devs to literally send GOG the Steam version of a game (with Steamworks formatted achievements intact), then essentially "wrap" a Goldberg crack-style Steam "wrapper" around it that translates Steam achievements into Galaxy ones on the fly. All that is a massive compromise due to "popular demand" of wanting achievements in every game here vs many devs who aren't going to go back and recode everything especially for Galaxy.

No I do know what I'm talking about. Read AB2012's post immediately above this one quoting a GOG dev acknowledging the problem. It's certainly not normal for some DRM-Free offline installer games sold here to take up to 5x longer to start than same DRM'd Steam ones (including the time it takes to do an online Steamworks DRM check). Nor for the only other way to get affected titles to startup normally without hanging for ages waiting for Galaxy is for the end user to use actual Steam cracks to replace the GOG ghost wrapper (on GOG versions of games...) so that the fake GOG client wrapped around that fake Steam client wrapper doesn't get "confused". All that for the sake of cheaping out on achievement integration is an utterly absurd "DRM-Free solution" vs just using an actual DRM-Free build for offline installers (as they used to pre-Galaxy).

I really like that game. A non-punishing 3d platformer. I should reinstall it and give it another go…
Excellent write up as always, except one tiny detail: GOG does not apply the wrapper. They just provide the wrapper and a manual.

And some 2024 games have the issue as well: Cats Hidden in Georgia was released this year. Probably because they just copied the wrapper from on of the other games in the series.

What? It took more than 2 HOURS to install Civ 4??? Are you serious?
I gotta try that out myself. Downloading right now. Can't let you have all the fun, right?



Thank you for the link.

Looks like we have achievements users to blame for offline installer issues. Jk haha I wonder how GOG would be if steam was not around.

Hm, yeah. Something is clearly off here.
My setup:
- fresh downloads (setup_civilization4_complete_2.0.0.4.exe and 1.bin)
- Ubuntu VM, 3 cores, 6 GB of RAM
- wine-9.3 (Staging), 64-bit prefix,
- reading / running the setup.exe from a network drive** (new SSD)
- writing / installing to another network drive** (old HDD)
(** no real networking, no speed limitation. Just a way to share files between VMWare and its host computer.)
Task manager says the setup.exe writes about 3 MB/s. CPU usage is minimal.
But after 20 mins only 216 MB have arrived on the target drive which equates to ~ 180 kB/s.

No wonder that this takes forever. Will cancel now and retry on a pure Windows setup.

UPDATE:
Windows 7:
The setup completed in under 6 MINUTES. (thus writing ~ 12 MB/s)
Same computer, reading from the SSD, writing to the old HDD.

I understand what you are saying. But the only way the app would hang is if the developer allowed it to. There's no reason the app needs to make a blocking call on the main thread.