Fabian GiesenOct 4, 2023

"OMG it's a 25GB game patch, must be tons of amazing new content that they're keeping quiet about."

*Could* be, sure, and stealth launches are a thing sometimes, but generally speaking, if it's a big patch for no discernible reason not attached to anything upcoming that's already been announced, the actual reason is probably something very boring and usually non-game-related

Show threadFabian GiesenOct 4, 2023

(Very) incomplete list of reasons for big patches that are completely unrelated to new content, from personal experience:

- Somebody added an extra field to some header somewhere, so everything that comes after the header moves and has slightly different context, plus content chunking puts chunk boundaries in different places now, so all the compressed data after changes
- We updated compilers and our assets are built using fast math, YOLO

Show threadFabian GiesenOct 4, 2023
- Sound assets use Opus in float (not fixed-point) mode which uses RCPSS/RSQRTSS during encode, and we switched our build machines between Intel and AMD, so presto, new audio for everyone
- we changed audio codecs
- we changed lossless data codecs for some or all data
- we changed _something_ and don't know for sure what or why it's a 15GB patch but we only noticed 4 days before cert and it was too scary to figure out and fix before then, so here's hoping it's fine
Show threadFabian GiesenOct 4, 2023
- this one simple bugfix in our vector math library had bigger ripple effects than we thought
- this one simple bugfix in the platform libm had bigger ripple effects than we thought
- this one simple bugfix in our compiled asset caching had bigger ripple effects than we thought
- who are we kidding, past a certain scale there's really no such thing as a simple bugfix
Show threadFabian GiesenOct 4, 2023
- given all of the above, reproducible asset builds are Actually Hard, therefore we use content-addressed storage and just cache build artifacts... unfortunately something went wrong and corrupted that store so we had to rebuild everything and this is what happened
Show threadFabian Giesen
- these normal maps used to be BC5 and now are ASTC 5x5 on this target, which saves us a bunch of desperately-needed memory at runtime but also means we get to re-distribute new normal maps for ALL THE THINGS
Oct 4, 2023 at 9:51pmWeb
Show threadMichael VanceOct 5, 2023
@rygorous you forgot “there were apparently some not well understood limits in window or file size analysis in the platform packaging system and of the two folks who understood it one left the company and the other is scrambling to understand it and he’s in a different time zone and actually isn’t supposed to be working on this anyway so don’t get your hopes up.” All purely hypothetical of course.
Show threadMichael VanceOct 5, 2023
@rygorous or “the platform actually doesn’t provide a way to know the final patch size until it’s done processing on their backend and/or QA installs it from the retail test environment and that is a manual process that takes a few hours for each build.” Again purely hypothetical.
Show threadRaeOct 5, 2023
@rygorous Build determinism issue - fused-multiply and add. Different build configs or compiler versions strikes again!
Show threadManoel NetoOct 9, 2023
@rygorous
- The game is made with Unity, doesn't use asset bundles, nothing changed and you just made a new build.