What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?

I think this issue is actually quite a large problem. I somewhat regularly get PMs from users with (allegedly) fast internet that are running into extremely slow downloads trying to download coop/mods outside of patching periods. I have no idea how often this is actually due to the server's bandwidth being saturated, but I suspect it is somewhat often. Considering that the percentage of people who will message a mod (and me specifically) about an issue is typically an extraordinarily small percentage of people who experience this issue, this problem may be widespread outside of patching periods. (Someone with server analytic access can tell me if I'm totally off base if the bandwidth actually isn't saturated outside of patching periods)

We should also strive to provide the best user experience possible during patching periods. Creating a 1-2 day window where FAF is basically unusable for users outside of Europe every few months should be avoided if possible. We should not expect the average user to use some random mirror that no one knows about. If players can't play FAF, they go somewhere else and they might not come back. If we have someone willing to set up a CDN that costs $400/month to avoid this issue, we should do it, we can afford it. Will it eat into the the tournament budget? Yes, but ensuring the best possible UX is most important.

@brutus5000 said in What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?:

@sheikah said in What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?:

The caching is only useful if you go back and watch old replays. For most players this is never any issue. The download happens when a patch is released and then it is over.

It is a much bigger issue to consume all the memory with the cached files as people may have limited space on their C: drives.

I thought we added a file (size) limit and that it is on by default. We should really do that as it seems stable.

I am not aware of any file size limit. Right now there is just an option for users to specify how long the cache exists for.

I agree with Skwoll, for die hard fans of FAF it might not be that big of a problem. But for newer or more casual players this might be something that is really off putting, even more that it doesn't happen only on patch periods.

I myself while not suffering as hard as others still get mildly annoyed when I have to spend 5-10 minutes downloading older patches just to download the current one in about half an hour later, and that's not even on the patch days. Considering that some might even spend 10 times the amount of time downloading few rather small files seems like something that we should look into.

I feel lucky as my patch downloads usually take 10-15 seconds. Also at the same time when many others experience download issues on several occasions, making me believe we are not saturating the server bandwidth but rather networks/ISP's along the way have routing issues or are throttling traffic.

I'm always able to download the patch instantly while other people have been having the issue for several days in a row, so it seems to be more complex than just bandwidth. I also live in the US.

Yeah I can count on one hand the number of times I've had issues downloading patches or maps and none of those occurrences were recent. I am also US based. I am also wondering if what Gieb said is a part of the issue, I remember when myself and other burgers stuck with Comcast as their ISP basically couldn't play FAF without awful lag for a month or whatever it was.

Edit: Also I completely agree with Swkoll. Sure I'm not going anywhere if I can't download a patch for a day or two, but that's not the case with new people.

Having a CDN could fix other non-saturation based issues as (insert random ISP) is less likely to have issues communicating with the nearest cloudflare server than a single dedicated server in germany.

Well we had the same problem with Github downloads which has a worldwide CDN, so I'm still not sure if CDN can actually fix it.
So apart from just throwing money at some company, how would we measure that we actually improved the situation?

Isn’t that just a feature of github though? They don’t want to be used as a free CDN so they’re going to throttle download speeds. It just makes sense.

I think the biggest bottleneck is once again manpower. We don’t really have the free time to figure out how to set up a cdn, and how much it would cost, and how it would integrate into our stack.

If I had infinite time and money I’d love to do the following:

1. Enable a CDN for patch distribution
2. Fix our awfully inefficient distribution method so it only gives you the data you don’t already have
3. Integrate a proper version manager into the client so you never have to download the same patch twice, even if you watch a lot of replays on different patch versions or on fafdevelop.

Sadly my money and time are only finite and already allocated to many FAF projects like TMM.

@brutus5000 said in What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?:

Well we had the same problem with Github downloads which has a worldwide CDN, so I'm still not sure if CDN can actually fix it.
So apart from just throwing money at some company, how would we measure that we actually improved the situation?

Perhaps we could get data on download times and look at averages/medians/etc?

@emperor_penguin said in [What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?]

Perhaps we could get data on download times and look at averages/medians/etc?

Problem is someone has to develop all that and then parse through the data.

I personally wasted like 20 minutes refafing trying to join a lobby without realizing it was downloading a new patch, and then spent around another hour downloading the new patch, leaving me with no time to play the game I was originally excited to play. It was such a frustrating experience I haven't really played since. I'm obviously not going to leave FAF because of this, but I can see less committed players quitting because of it.

It's a really bad player experience because it's not clear what's happening when you are downloading a new patch—the download progress is small and in the bottom right corner and not at all descriptive. I think it was downloading something called env.nx2 and the loading bar was not even visibly moving, so at first I assumed something was wrong.

I understand that this is a very difficult problem to tackle, and I know how much work you devs are putting in already, but I really think this should be one of the highest priority problems to tackle. For average users like me, if the actual download issues can't be solved, I think at least communicating clearly that it's downloading a new patch and that I should just sit tight and wait for it to finish would be a big improvement.

@archsimkat said in What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?:

I think at least communicating clearly that it's downloading a new patch and that I should just sit tight and wait for it to finish would be a big improvement.

So no complaining when I put a big blinky flashing box about the patch downloading and you think it pops up too often

Maybe just a pop up that tells me there's a new game patch when I try to launch a game would be fine, I don't pretend to know good design practices and what would work well here.

It would have to show progress of some kind otherwise it is the same thing where people see it once and then think it didn't work because it takes so long. And would also need to be more in your face about it than the current iteration as that gets overlooked.

Perfect place to bring back everyone's favorite ACU

Kill two birds with one stone and just vertically fill out the dancing ACU as a loading bar

Why not allow people to download the updates before joining a game? As in, add an update game client button somewhere in the FAF client. So people don't see a game they want to join, attempt to join it, and then just get stuck downloading an update while that game fills and starts. If we can't easily fix the download speed issue right now, we can at least make the experience a little better.

Just throwing this idea out there:
RSS BitTorrent feed for new patches, small BitTorrent client built-in within the client.
https://rometools.github.io/rome/
https://github.com/mpetazzoni/ttorrent

I know it would involve a significant amount of work client + server side, but it would in theory minimize download issues and we would not be dependent on some service or have to pay for it.

Not to take away from the thread but I think this a great a way to summarize how people feel.

I think my patch downloaded in less than a minute =\