Compressed game installers

[Charlie]

Why doesn't Steam compress the game installers, doing this would save time on downloading the game and Valve would save money because they wouldn't have to spend so much on storage. On Torrent sites you will see games under what they call a 'repack' and it drastically reduces the size of the game installer.

I decided to see what I could compress my Skyrim game folder and it went from 12GB to 5GB. This could work by you download the game, it will uncompress itself and then it will install DirectX and all the other Redist stuff it needs.

[wuddih]

steam does compress. and that not too less. it downloads compressed and extracs on the fly. southpark is 6 gigs on disk and the download is 4. you never download 12 gigs of skyrim if the gamefolder is 12 gigs.

[Charlie]

Początkowo opublikowane przez ☔ wuddih SpNv ✔:

steam does compress. and that not too less. it downloads compressed and extracs on the fly. southpark is 6 gigs on disk and the download is 4. you never download 12 gigs of skyrim if the gamefolder is 12 gigs.

Skyrim is a 12GB download if you have the DLC and the HD Texture Pack, it's a 12GB download and it's around 13GB on disk. I am talking about downloading like a 5GB or 8GB file, and it will uncompress to its original size like 12GB or 20GB etc... It is possible, you will see games that are 20GB be compressed into 8GB installers

[aiusepsi]

Steam downloads are compressed - and encrypted - already. They're decrypted and decompressed (in that order. Why the other order would be a terrible idea is left as an exercise for the reader) in memory before they're written to disk.

[Charlie]

Początkowo opublikowane przez aiusepsi:

Steam downloads are compressed - and encrypted - already. They're decrypted and decompressed (in that order. Why the other order would be a terrible idea is left as an exercise for the reader) in memory before they're written to disk.

The current Steam compression doesn't really save much space, read the post before ''you will see games that are 20GB be compressed into 8GB installers'' that is what I'm talking about. That is over a 50% reduction in size, why don't we see this happening on Steam? As I said before it would drastically reduce download times (which would help people with a slow connection) and Valve would save money on storage.

[aiusepsi]

I usually see pretty good ratios, for example GTA3 here is 1319 MB of disk space required, and a 696.5 MB download. That's 52.8% of the original size, which is pretty decent. That said, in general it's highly dependent on what the input data is what compression ratio is available even under theoretically perfect conditions. Some games are just going to be more amenable to compression than others.

In principle yes, you could potentially find greater redundancies across the entire set of game files than Steam's block-by-block approach (and thus greater opportunities for higher compression ratios) but Steam's system has a number of operational advantages going for it which you wouldn't get with downloading a single large file.

For example, Steam parallelises downloads by downloading blocks of files in parallel; Origin grabs chunks out of a large file using range requests. Steam's method is trivial to cache, and Origin's a nightmare (see http://blog.multiplay.co.uk/2014/04/lancache-dynamically-caching-game-installs-at-lans-using-nginx/)

[wuddih]

someone knows something ;)

installing a game on steam never required the game to be extracted from single compressed archives. so you basically want to change a 11+ year old and established design concept. the download is compressed to save bandwidth, not to save space. space is cheap today, bandwidth costs a bit, so it is efficient to save a bit there ... and i still don't believe that skyrim is a 12gb download if it ends up being 12gb on your hdd.

also compression and uncompression takes up resources. my netbooks hdd starts to fart on most steam downloads on the uncompression part, i periodically get busy writing to disk messages all the time on a download.

[Charlie]

Początkowo opublikowane przez ☔ wuddih SpNv ✔:

someone knows something ;)

installing a game on steam never required the game to be extracted from single compressed archives. so you basically want to change a 11+ year old and established design concept. the download is compressed to save bandwidth, not to save space. space is cheap today, bandwidth costs a bit, so it is efficient to save a bit there ... and i still don't believe that skyrim is a 12gb download if it ends up being 12gb on your hdd.

also compression and uncompression takes up resources. my netbooks hdd starts to fart on most steam downloads on the uncompression part, i periodically get busy writing to disk messages all the time on a download.

Skyrim is a 12GB download if you have the DLC and the HD Texture Pack, it's a 12GB download and it's around 13GB on disk. I am talking about downloading like a 5GB or 8GB file, and it will uncompress to its original size like 12GB or 20GB etc... It is possible, you will see games that are 20GB be compressed into 8GB installers. As I said before ''The current Steam compression doesn't really save much space'' Please read previous posts before posting. As for the resources you wouldn't get any errors, it downloads the compressed files to your disk and after that it will un-compress them. Think of it like downloading a Zip file, you download it, unzip it and then install it. It would be the same principle with a game and as I said it would save alot on bandwidth, 20GB to 8GB is a huge saving.

[Satoru]

Because when you're trying to zip the file that's a different methdology than what steam is using.

[wuddih]

screenshot of active steam download would be nice ;) i am eager to buy the crap just to upload a screenshot of the real download amount myself but i hate the game too much to throw my money out of the window

i dont really wanna discuss that further, your attempt is nicely meant, but it will cost more in the long run. compression via your method wont save any money and money is the only reason someone would consider doing it.

and i say that as a 7zip commit dev for a whole decade. compression is for permanent storage, not for permanently changing content. i also explained with the method you want, you want to change an 11 year old design concept, your attempt would completely screw up updating games.

[Charlie]

Początkowo opublikowane przez ☔ wuddih SpNv ✔:

screenshot of active steam download would be nice ;) i am eager to buy the crap just to upload a screenshot of the real download amount myself but i hate the game too much to throw my money out of the window

i dont really wanna discuss that further, your attempt is nicely meant, but it will cost more in the long run. compression via your method wont save any money and money is the only reason someone would consider doing it.

and i say that as a 7zip commit dev for a whole decade. compression is for permanent storage, not for permanently changing content. i also explained with the method you want, you want to change an 11 year old design concept, your attempt would completely screw up updating games.

How would it ''screw up updating games'', updates wouldn't necessarily be compressed and even if they were it would be the the same principle, update is downloaded, uncompressed and installed. The reason for doing this is not to save money (although Valve would save money doing so) the point is that doing this would reduce the amount of time it takes to download a game, shorter download time for a game also equals less load on the Steam servers. ''compression is for permanent storage, not for permanently changing content'' you already said that Steam compresses games before 'steam does compress' the only difference here is the games would be compressed alot more so they would download quicker. I just don't understand why Valve doesn't do this, as I said before you can take a 20GB game and compress it into a 8GB installer. If there is a reason why they don't do this then please point it out. Whenever I reinstall Windows I usually compress my games and uncompress then back into my Steam directory so I don't have to download them again and I have never had any problems compressing games. ''you want to change an 11 year old design concept'' That right there might be the problem, if Steam has been using the same download system for 11 years then Steam hasn't really changed much, the client was practically the same for over a decade with small changes here and there; only recently have Valve started to update the client and improve it (although some do dislike the new look) if games can be compressed to shorten the download time then they should. If there is a reason why they don't do this then fine, but if not then Valve should be doing this, it would help people who have data caps and games would download quicker; you can't complain about games downloading quicker.

[aiusepsi]

Steam's download system is only three years old, not 11: http://store.steampowered.com/news/5856/

The decisions they made when they designed that new system were generally pretty sensible ones. Also the recent changes to the way it looks are incredibly minor, almost insignificant, changes compared to the under-the-hood stuff they've been working on the past few years.

[Spawn of Totoro]

May depend on the game and the developer.

Downloaded Skyrim again recently and it was 12 GB after download. For the download, it was about 11GB.

Just downloaded Dota 2 and it was 6.5 GB to download, taking 12 GB afterwords.

There may be more to it then simply choosing it compress a game to as small of a file as possible.

[Gun2275]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Spawn of Totoro:

May depend on the game and the developer.

Downloaded Skyrim again recently and it was 12 GB after download. For the download, it was about 11GB.

Just downloaded Dota 2 and it was 6.5 GB to download, taking 12 GB afterwords.

There may be more to it then simply choosing it compress a game to as small of a file as possible.

Ok so I'm just putting this out here if I didn't like steam as much as I did It would be easyer to download GTA 5 on rockstar's web site, it is 77.6 GB download on steam if I went though Rockstar I would have goten a 5.8 MB installer that would install GTA 5 in aboute 20 min, but in steam I am looking at a 14+ day wait for it to install and I have to restart my desktop every 24 hours or my computer starts to drop files coming in (this I understand because my computer is right from 2005) so ya I thought I should put this in for every one else to debate

[Cathulhu]

That doesn't make any sense as the game is the same size, no matter if bought through Steam, or directly from Rockstar. The 5.8MB launcher would still download the game, just like Steam.
To download GTA V with that speed you'd need one beastly internet connection and a really fast drive to write and process data fast enough.

[Gun2275]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Cathulhu:

That doesn't make any sense as the game is the same size, no matter if bought through Steam, or directly from Rockstar. The 5.8MB launcher would still download the game, just like Steam.
To download GTA V with that speed you'd need one beastly internet connection and a really fast drive to write and process data fast enough.

I just saying that rockstar for GTA 5 at least uses a difrent compression system and I have a almost the same read and write on my HDD as a SSD but only because I have 3 new harddrives and new cables for them, but my internet is really bad because it caps out on speed tests at 196KB but ya steam just uses a unusal comprestion system thats all