Game demo rant

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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24 Feb 2004
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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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
Chrissake, you're like some mould on the wall that keeps growing back even after you rub it off with bleach: if my thread is so awful what are you still doing in it?
 
me said:
I tried to download the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta client and it was a mahoosive 5GB .zip file!
Click to expand...
helmutcheese said:
The solution is he gets a cheap 4GB Thumbdrive (said it before).
Click to expand...
Say it once more!

No, let's say it all together: "HELMUTCHEESE MAKES BIG £££ (presumably not doing maths-intensive work) AND SPENDS IT ALL ON L337 PHAT 'ARD DRIVES!!! YOU DA MAN YO!"


PS. In all seriousness, the issue is not whether I or any individual user has enough space to download a particular demo - the issue is that the wastefulness and inelegance of it all grates on my nerves. A packed .exe installer which is zipped on top requires at least three times as much space to install! In the case of the 5GB POTBS client, you'd need 5GB to save the .zip file, 5GB to unzip the .exe installer, another 5GB (probably more) for the installer to unpack its contents into the Windows Temporary Files folder, and another 5GB for the installed game to go on. Assuming you delete the .zip immediately after unpacking the installer, that's 15GB, not to mention the time wasted time spent unzipping it! It's just so wasteful that it would annoy me even if I had 4 Terrabytes of storage and a 3.6GHz Quad Core that could unzip archives faster than I can post a rant on ocuk!

Using better compression methods like 7z or rar isn't the solution. The solution is having a little bit of consideration for the end-user and using a bit of common sense:
a. offer the damned uncompressed .exe installer! If data corruption is a serious issue use an installer with CRC checking! If gamershell and fileplanet think it is imperative that they stick their stupid little URLs in the download (as if we didn't know where the hell we just downloaded it from), there's easier and more considerate ways of doing it than zipping a massive bloody installer just so you can stick a tiny little .txt file in there: you could stick the URL at the end of the filename (eg. maxpayne_demo_downloaded_from_gamershell.com.exe) or you can unpack use an installer package to unpack the .exe file's contents and stick your stupid little .txt files inside the installer package!
b. if you MUST offer downloads in the form of archives, then the unpacked data could easily be uncompressed rather than in a single .exe installer, which is effectively a sfx archive. At least the extraction would then happen only once rather than twice!
It's just that the way people in the games industry do things reminds me of the attitude of a jobsworth who's looking for the lazy shortcut for everything they do! No wonder we have such an insanely inflationary bloating in the minimum requirements of most games for the last few years: everyone's cutting corners and expecting the end user to subsidise the time they spend playing WoW in the office!
 
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