Hi, do you have any updates regarding this? System Shock 2 was updated today with the new packaging method, breaking my wrapper for it :/

Well, "The change is here to stay" is news...

Unfortunately not a good one for me. I understand this was an unintended side effect but unless the situation improves, it seems I won't be buying any more old Windows games for Wine use.

At this point, I'd rather download them through Galaxy and package them myself.

Is anything planned to resolve the other issues with these new installers? e.g. the significantly slower install speed, the potential for a lot of unnecessary SSD write cycles/wear, not retaining the original file timestamps etc?

I second the request to provide the original timestamps.

I think the boost is more due to the weaker compression (so it's faster to compress everything, but at the cost of having larger installer sizes)

Ah, but then what is the purpose of this change, exactly:
"files are now identified by their hash, and possibly chunked"

only package the game once, then push out the result via galaxy and embed it into the offline installer.
instead of doing it separately for each distribution method

Same here! I will hold on buying anything here until some "clean" installers replace the current ones, if that will ever happen.

I like the concept of the new installers. Don't understand why they had to implement in such a shitty way though. I guess there has to be a drawback to every technical thing on GOG.

Which of these new installers apply to the constant unnecessary read and write cycles? I have a 60gb startup ssd that will get wrecked quicker than usual because it has a nice bit of use on it already.

IKR. I posted a few weeks ago in a thread about the fact that the most recent Witcher 2 installer (which is dated to last summer) is larger with 3 GB than an older installer, while the game files are basically the same. Was an increase from 15,544 MB to 18,682 MB.

I understand they used a faster compression method to save on time, but how come that the installers pushed last month are actually slower when installing? I liked best when they used RAR archives (not the password protected ones, ofc) - you could unpack the game even without using innoextract.

BTW, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl still has the installer with password protected archive.

Me too! It always helped me when modding games. And this will probably make a mess with Bethesda games. From what I remember, their assets (those ESM and ESP files) are loaded based on file timestamps.

EDIT:
There are many of them, probably most of the games updated starting this March.

Look in this thread, those marked with Installer-only updates are most likely. But also many of those with 'Real' updates are packed with the latest installer - Signal from Tolva, for example.

Darn. I have two just from this week. Finally, a real challenge that is just really problem that is unable to be fixed because of my lack of coding. I knew I should have purchased a backup drive earlier. At least then I would've had the old installers.