Game demo rant

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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Why the **** do developers and download sites insist on offering game demo installers in .zip format? THE FILES ARE ALREADY PACKED INSIDE THE INSTALLER YOU NIMRODS!!!! They're saving a couple hundred kilobytes at most in the best of cases, and in some cases the .zip overhead is so big that the unpacked .exe file is the same size as the zipped archive or even smaller!

I tried to download the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta client and it was a mahoosive 5GB .zip file!! My 2.2GHz Athlon will probably take half an hour to unpack that! And zipping it means I need FOUR TIMES as much free hard disk space to install it: 5GB to save the archive, 5GB for the unzipped .exe installer, probably another 5GB in the Windows temp folder for the installer to unpack all its data while installing it, and 5GB on the partition the game is going to be finally installed in! WTF???? What kind of IDIOT made this moronic decision, all for the sake of 400KB of Fileplanet's bandwidth that they're saving!
 
I don't think it's so much about the bandwidth/file size, more the fact that they like to bundle extra advertising in the zip file (e.g. gamershell sticking a text file in there).

What annoys me more is:

1) The use of .zip over superior formats like .7z
2) When sometimes .zip is purely used for archiving with zero compression applied.
 
A ZIP file has a checksum to test if the file is corrupt or not. Because not all game installers are forced to do those type of checks.
 
Tbh I'd prefer the risk of having a corrupt install than a zip, I have very little hdd space left free always as it is :(.
 
NathanE said:
A ZIP file has a checksum to test if the file is corrupt or not. Because not all game installers are forced to do those type of checks.
Click to expand...

Irrelevant: unless the download is packed in a multi-part archive then you're still forced to re-download the whole thing if the file is corrupted, so neither the user nor the file hosting service save any bandwidth/time. HangTime's speculation that it's done simply so as to include the tiny little .txt file with a bit of pathetic advertising is much more likely.
 
Hence I even resort to torrents for game demo's, often it still maxes out my connection yet I can choose the torrent myself and make sure it's the .exe immediatly so I have no stupid .rar's or zips to unpack.
 
Gamershell just pack in extra crap, it's got nothing to do with making it a smaller filesize as installers are already as small as can be.

It is an annoyance yes, but I just select unzip and browse my e-mail or the internet while it is busy unzipping, it is called Windows not Window ;) :p
 
They add a .TXT file and a IE Shortcut to there site, big deal it must be about 10KB MAX in size extra.

You just choose what to extract and what not to using Winrar.
 
helmutcheese said:
They add a .TXT file and a IE Shortcut to there site, big deal it must be about 10KB MAX in size extra.

You just choose what to extract and what not to using Winrar.
Click to expand...

Filesize of the archive that you download isn't the issue, even the presence of the additional files doesn't matter, it's the fact that you have to extract several gigabytes after download that he's worried about. With dodgy fragmented hds with little space and an underpowered cpu, that can take several minutes, and also means that you need a lot more 'temp' space (i.e. if you download a 2gig file, you are going to need at least another 2gig to extract it). Often more if the installer is an SFX archive using it's own temp space.
 
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Exactly, I have my hard drives partitioned into smaller bits so temporary download space is at a premium, and if helmutcheese wants to buy another one just to dump his game demos that's his business but he's got a sad life if that's all he spends his money on.
BTW the 5GB thing wasn't a demo, it was the full beta client for that Pirates MMO.
 
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