How does Steam handle patch releases that happen during a first-time download of a game ?

[rebb]

I was just at 90% download of a game, which had already been taking over 10 hours, when the download fell to 0.
So i changed the download server and restarted Steam - and suddenly the game started to download from the BEGINNING again.

Apparently there has been a patch release.

Now i was wondering if this is actual expected behaviour for Steam ?

Is there no system in place that keeps a "baseline" version of the game around for straggling downloaders, and then downloads the patches once they are done downloading ?

If so, i guess that might mean that the Devs may have been sloppy in doing some setup.

But i'm not sure either way.

Anyone know more ?

[Start_Running]

Yup. That's normal. if a patch is released during down load then it will detetct the patch once installed and download again ... There is no system for baseline since there is no reason to keep a version you know to be outdated accessible.

[cinedine]

Yes it's desired behaviour.
There is one repository you download. If the game updates, the repository is updated. Which means the hash changes and your download is invalided.

The two somewhat feasible alternatives are:
- Download each and every patch ever, which can result in downloads accumulating to or even exceeding the base game size (especially with games like Path of Exile that make you download the compiled asset file). Which also has the downside of having countless outdated versions and patches on the servers taking up space and you downloading those outdated versions only to replace them anyway.
- Download the delta from base version to the latest version, which can result in the very same size problem and still resets your patch download every time.

[rebb]

I think it could also be done by instead of having one monolithic package to download, somehow split up games into distinct sub-module packages.

Say one package is all texture data, another all audio, another gameplay code etc.

A patch might not be touching all of the data types at once, so certain submodules stay "valid".
And while downloading only the specific submodule that was hit by a patch needs to be redownloaded.

Sure, it will never happen, but i could see it work like that.