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General discussionlinuxvangog - Fantastic Linux & Mac Guy and Where To Find Him(307 posts)(307 posts)
(307 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted April 13, 2018
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vidsgame: 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.
I'm not sure if the installers use the Windows TEMP folders or not, but maybe you could try and change that location to a HDD, like explained here. The steps might be different on Windows 10, so use Google.
Posted April 13, 2018
I'm glad that I at least downloaded Witcher 3 before March and I'm crossing my fingers hoping that it was unaffected by this ( I believe I downloaded when the GOTY came out, so I should be good.) However, the whole point of me getting an SSD was to install the games on there to decrease the load times. Mainly for the more loading-intensive titles like Kingdom Come and Witcher 3. Thank you for the advice. I will do that.
Post edited April 13, 2018 by vidsgame
Posted April 13, 2018
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vidsgame: 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.
tbh with todays SSDs you don't really need to worry about wear anymore. The drives are not as fragile as they used to be. the numbers I recall from stress tests are that you will need to write 100GB a day for ~20 years before seeing your first failure (in the worst case). you really have to excessively install games 24/7 to significantly contribute to that.
Only exception is if you have one of those first 16-32GB SSDs when they first appeared on the market like what, 10 years ago?. But in all likelihood those are already long dead, and if not then you really don't want windows to store the temp folder on that drive, GOG installers or not.

that being said, the useless, additional copy is not doubt annoying and a rather shitty implementation.
Post edited April 13, 2018 by immi101
Posted April 13, 2018
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vidsgame: 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.
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immi101: tbh with todays SSDs you don't really need to worry about wear anymore. The drives are not as fragile as they used to be. the numbers I recall from stress tests are that you will need to write 100GB a day for ~20 years before seeing your first failure (in the worst case). you really have to excessively install games 24/7 to significantly contribute to that.
Only exception is if you have one of those first 16-32GB SSDs when they first appeared on the market like what, 10 years ago?. But in all likelihood those are already long dead, and if not then you really don't want windows to store the temp folder on that drive, GOG installers or not.

that being said, the useless, additional copy is not doubt annoying and a rather shitty implementation.
Uh Oh. Well, I did get this SSD around 10 years ago and up until now I was setting things up to make a backup of my HDD because I was worried that it might be showing its age because I tend to recycle hard drives rather than throw them out and buy new ones. This SSD in particular is my very first one and was purchased when SSDs were uber expensive. Luckily, I believe the only thing it has on it is Windows for now and games but I will double check and make the adjustments because it seems like I will have to.
Posted April 13, 2018
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adamhm: 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?
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immi101: I second the request to provide the original timestamps.
Regarding the...
- install speed: we observed that in some cases Windows games actually install b]faster than before, and in cases when they install slower, the difference is only about 10-20%. If your experiences with them were different, please provide us with your data so we can investigate.
- increased SSD usage: I honestly don't even know how to reply to that. Yes, the change introduces additional file operations during installation process, but not that much more than before. Data storage drives are meant to be used.
- timestamps: could you tell me what do you need them for and what do you mean by "original"? Can you name examples? Installed files have timestamps from the moment of file creation after unpacking. From our knowledge, it has never caused a problem with running games sold on GOG.com.

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Ganni1987: (...) unless the situation improves, it seems I won't be buying any more old Windows games for Wine use.
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ariaspi: (...) I will hold on buying anything here until some "clean" installers replace the current ones, if that will ever happen.
Sorry to hear that. I'd like to emphasize that installing Windows games on Linux systems is still possible by using Wine. As for other options, now and in the future, I have already mentioned them in my previous post.

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phaolo: (...) I don't understand(...)
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Yepoleb: (...) Don't understand (...)
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ariaspi: I understand (...) but how come (...)
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immi101: [They] 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
immi101 is right. And that's really what the change is about here.

One of the biggest issues reported is that in some cases, game updates distributed in offline installers are/were behind updates distributed by the Galaxy client, sometimes even lagging by a day or two. This might not be your priority, but we are now resolving this problem for everyone interested in being up-to-date when using offline builds.
Post edited April 13, 2018 by linuxvangog
Posted April 13, 2018
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linuxvangog: One of the biggest issues reported is that in some cases, game updates distributed in offline installers are/were behind updates distributed by the Galaxy client, sometimes even lagging by a day or two. This might not be your priority, but we are now resolving this problem for everyone interested in being up-to-date when using offline builds.
Do you mean when you uploaded Galaxy updates on friday and postponed the standalones till monday? >: )

By the way, why does the installer need chunks?
I thought those were temporarly adopted during a download, not created directly in the source O_o
Post edited April 13, 2018 by phaolo
Posted April 13, 2018
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Yepoleb: (...) Don't understand (...)
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linuxvangog: immi101 is right. And that's really what the change is about here.

One of the biggest issues reported is that in some cases, game updates distributed in offline installers are/were behind updates distributed by the Galaxy client, sometimes even lagging by a day or two. This might not be your priority, but we are now resolving this problem for everyone interested in being up-to-date when using offline builds.
Hey, that's not what my quote was about! Building the installers from Galaxy depots is a perfectly reasonable step, doing it in such a shitty way is not. There's no reason to package the chunks instead of the full files and make installers more complicated, slower, bigger and incompatible with existing tools. I'm usually on the developer's side, but this time it seems like just a straight up bad decision.
Post edited April 13, 2018 by Yepoleb
Posted April 13, 2018
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linuxvangog: Regarding the...
- install speed: we observed that in some cases Windows games actually install b]faster than before, and in cases when they install slower, the difference is only about 10-20%. If your experiences with them were different, please provide us with your data so we can investigate.
Can you clarify which games have faster installs in this scenario?
Posted April 13, 2018
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vidsgame: <snip>
The old installers for the most part simply unpacked the files from the installer directly to the target install location, while the new installers first copy the compressed chunks that are stored inside them into the user's temp directory (normally C:\users\%user%\temp) and then decompress them from there to the target install location.

You should be able to relocate your user temp directory to another drive, on Win7 this can be done by changing the TEMP and TMP environment variables to point at the desired location.

The speed difference varies depending on system setup & the weaker compression can speed things up a bit, but this comes at the cost of larger filesizes.

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linuxvangog: - timestamps: could you tell me what do you need them for and what do you mean by "original"? Can you name examples? Installed files have timestamps from the moment of file creation after unpacking. From our knowledge, it has never caused a problem with running games sold on GOG.com.
This is the first example that comes to mind:

https://www.gog.com/forum/elder_scrolls_series/gog_doesnt_set_proper_last_modified_times_on_esmesp_files_which_results_in_modding_and_vanilla_i
Posted April 13, 2018
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vidsgame: <snip>
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adamhm: The old installers for the most part simply unpacked the files from the installer directly to the target install location, while the new installers first copy the compressed chunks that are stored inside them into the user's temp directory (normally C:\users\%user%\temp) and then decompress them from there to the target install location.

You should be able to relocate your user temp directory to another drive, on Win7 this can be done by changing the TEMP and TMP environment variables to point at the desired location.

The speed difference varies depending on system setup & the weaker compression can speed things up a bit, but this comes at the cost of larger filesizes.
Thank You, Adamhm. That is great to know and I will look into it.
Posted April 14, 2018
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linuxvangog: but not that much more than before
They are doubled. That might not be that many operations in the grand scheme of things, but it is completely unnecessary. You need a lot of additional temporary space if you want to install a large game.

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linuxvangog: (…) immi101 is right. And that's really what the change is about here.

One of the biggest issues reported is that in some cases, game updates distributed in offline installers are/were behind updates distributed by the Galaxy client, sometimes even lagging by a day or two. This might not be your priority, but we are now resolving this problem for everyone interested in being up-to-date when using offline builds.
I don't understand this. This is – as usual – the most convoluted and customer unfriendly way to package things. If it is possible for us to create an unobfuscator (and we have several) then it is definitely possible to apply it before the installer is created! You could even write a script to do it automatically in less than an hour. Then you can switch back to a better compression algorithm. zlib is a horrible choice for long term storage especially if lzma2 is supported by InnoSetup. That would save a lot of unnecessary traffic for GOG and hard drive space for the users.


I'm baffled by many decision made by GOG, especially the technical ones are always completely random and never good.

–––

Losing the file creations information is a very bad idea. There are many examples. Some of them have been mentioned before i.e. the elder scrolls.

Another example is Doom, although it is not a technical reason: The wad files are expected to have specific creation dates.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom.wad

GOG used to pride itself as a keeper of the classic games. Many collector would consider a classic game tainted (and therefore worthless) if the file creation times were changed.
Posted April 14, 2018
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linuxvangog: - timestamps: could you tell me what do you need them for and what do you mean by "original"? Can you name examples? Installed files have timestamps from the moment of file creation after unpacking. From our knowledge, it has never caused a problem with running games sold on GOG.com.
Sometimes it's very useful if you want to find and backup settings and savegames. If all files have nearly the same date and time it's much harder to figure out which of them could be useful to backup.

But there are also many other reasons to keep the original file date.
Post edited April 14, 2018 by classic-gamer
Posted April 14, 2018
I see some non very diplomatic words above, but technically the dudes are right, I agree with all of that, and have not much to add. Maybe hire some smarter people to design things like architecture of your solutions, or make them open for discussion ahead, so people can fix similar mishaps before you will start implementing them.

And about galaxy vs offline installers being not a priority... keep in mind this topic is about linux, where the galaxy client sucks a bit (although it has nice tiny installer and doesn't interfere with anything else installed in its current linux version, so I'm not like cheering up to get some new one soon), so for linux users the offline installers are of much higher priority.

Hm, would you be able even to cut out support of the obsolete OSes like windows, you could implement the whole update patching by simply calling `rsync` on any modern OS, the technology is all done and set up, needs just few lines of script to use it.
Posted April 14, 2018
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ped7g:
Hehe hoho! Evil....
Posted April 16, 2018
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linuxvangog: - timestamps: could you tell me what do you need them for and what do you mean by "original"? Can you name examples? Installed files have timestamps from the moment of file creation after unpacking. From our knowledge, it has never caused a problem with running games sold on GOG.com.
"original" = keep the timestamps the same as they are when the developer transfers the files to you. normally you expect that copying/transferring a file should not modify file attributes.
when I have a tool/mod that works on the old disc version but not with the GOG version then looking at the modification dates of the files is a quick way to get an overview if and where GOG modified things.
same when a game gets an update and I want a quick look which files got changes. Stripping the file modification dates is simply a loss of information for no apparent reason. There is a reason why that information is retained when copying data on an usb stick and giving it to somebody, when putting it into a innosetup installer and distribute it to people or when putting a file in a zip archive and extract it later.
Going against established common behaviour is bound to cause confusion and irritation. (and bugs: see that link for Oblivion)

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linuxvangog: install speed
I did some testing yesterday and some games indeed take notably longer, see Kingpin for the worst offender.
but note that all this was tested under linux+wine. some windows people probably should try to verify that.

(the good news: innoextract is way faster with the new installers ^^)

############ system_shock_2 ##################
1) 497M Mär 23 00:44 'setup_system_shock_2_2.46_update_2_(18733).exe'
2) 510M Apr 15 00:07 'setup_system_shock_2_2.46_update_3_(19935).exe'
install size:
1) 536M
2) 536M
time:
1) 47.7 47.3 47.8
2) 45.2 44.2 45.7

########## simon_sorcerer_legacy ######################
1) 99M Dez 14 2016 setup_simon_the_sorcerer_2.0.0.18.exe (english)
2) 355M Apr 8 17:19 'setup_simon_the_sorcerer_1.0_(19666).exe' (multi-lang)
install size:
1) 216M
2) 226M
time:
1) 13.9, 13.1,
2) 28.6, 27.9

####### arcanum_of_steamworks_and_magick_obscura ##################
1) 1128415712 Mär 7 2015 setup_arcanum_2.0.0.15.exe # 1076M
2) 1167199224 Apr 3 14:22 'setup_arcanum_-_of_steamworks_and_magick_obscura_1.0.7.4_(19476).exe' # 1113M
install size:
1) 1138M
2) 1138M
time:
1) 59.3. 56.5, 57.9, 57.5
2) 47.4, 37.9, 37.8, 37.9

######### kingpin_life_of_crime #####
installer:
1) 323M Okt 7 2016 setup_kingpin_2.0.0.6.exe
2) 343M Apr 5 15:37 'setup_kingpin_life_of_crime_1.21_(19594).exe'
install size:
1) 594M game/
2) 597M game/
install time:
1) 52.7, 49.3, 49.4, 49.7, 49.1
2) 3m31.2, 3m30.9, 3m32.0, 3m26.3
extract: (innoextract --extract --silent -m --gog)
1) 28.2 28.4
2) 6.6 7.2
Post edited April 16, 2018 by immi101
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionlinuxvangog - Fantastic Linux & Mac Guy and Where To Find Him(307 posts)(307 posts)
(307 posts)