Is it possible to cache faf versions?
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As someone will a low download speed it is always a pain to have to redownload the game files whenever i am joining a different version of fa. For instance i wanted to try the faf dev games that were hosted today but i simply cant be bothered to wait for it to download for ages everytime. Something like this could help to get people to help with beta / development testing.
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Pretty sure when you join a dev, it's only downloading the most recent version. Caching wouldn't help, because they're constantly updating it right now.
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ah ok thats fair, is there a way to update files instead of downloading all of it
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It only updates the files that have changed already
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oh ok, interesting it is always so slow. Maybe i should do some more research lol
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All files are cached, but fafdevelop changes way to often to utilize the cache. We tried generating better patches (and even had a working implementation) but it has other drawbacks in (needs more disk writes and CPU), so we dropped it.
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And since the files are packed up in zip archives, if a single line in a single file gets changed you have to redownload the entire zip archive again...
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@askaholic said in Is it possible to cache faf versions?:
And since the files are packed up in zip archives, if a single line in a single file gets changed you have to redownload the entire zip archive again...
There's actually no need for them to be in .zip files as the game can mount folders.
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I suspect the game (original game) does it to prevent fetching scattered files on disk. E.g., small random reads / writes.
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@jip yes with most modern machines equipped with NVMe SSDs that should be less of a concern though
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Tell that to our players with their 10 year old notebooks.
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It’s more of a web issue. Like we dont want every new client making 3000 web requests to download all the files. Although there’s could probably be some combination of the two like get a Zip the first time and then switch to getting individual files, but that adds a lot of complexity and then of course you gotta hash all 3000 files on disk separately to check for changes.
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There is an option you can enable in the clients to cache versions of the game so they do not need to be redownloaded.
