5 ms·

This seems an incredible technical accomplishment. My one question is, is it supposed to be solving for disk space constraints or connection speed constraints?

This seems an incredible technical accomplishment. My one question is, is it supposed to be solving for disk space constraints or connection speed constraints? I'm guessing both, but the former is pretty cheaply solved these days with a new drive (or by finally admitting you only need to have 2-3 games installed at once and probably aren't playing a dozen games in parallel), and I'm not sure it seems to be solving the latter. The site says "stuck with 120mbps", and the demo on YouTube artificially caps download speeds to 200mbps, presumably as if to simulate "poor" connections. I'm in Australia and get 90-100 mbps, which is half of the demo speed, and I would be an upper outlier in this country. I can only imagine the people really suffering from 100GB downloads are on circa 5, 10, 20, 40 mbps. I get 10MBPs (megabytes) down reliably from Steam, which means even a 100GB game would "only" take ~ 2 and a half hours to download. The speed used in the demo would take ~ 75 minutes to download a 100GB game! Is that really an outrageously inconvenient wait? I sound more negative than I am. I guess what I'm saying is I'd love to know how slow your speed can get before this stops working well. That said, truly an impressive piece of tech.

NikolaNovak 3y ago
Right. 2.5 hours initial wait to then play a game normally is... fine. It's a non issue for most folks:) I noticed Battle.net from BLizzard tracks couple of thresholds in the progress bar - when the game will be fully downloaded, but also when the game is playable. For many updates, those two thresholds are very close together; but occasionally, the "playable" is half the distance or less of "completed", which makes me think somebody there is still putting in the effort :)
- MBCook 3y ago
  PS5 has a similar system to let you start playing (properly designed) games before downloading is complete. I know iOS has something like that, though o don’t think I’ve ever seen it used. And I’d expect Xbox does as well, but I’m not in that ecosystem so I don’t know as much about their features.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    That sounds like a lot of engineering effort for something with minimal payoff. Carefully balancing early vs late offsets for the one time payoff of playing while the game is still downloading. So many potential failure states vs just saying, "Wait another hour and then start"
    - Skullfurious 3y ago
      To you it might sound like a lot of effort but for a user who is on his 1 day off for the week not having to wait twice the amount of time to log in to play his game probably means more than you or I could ever imagine. Blizzard used to be about making everyone have an excellent experience and some of the legacy features they've had for years seriously still do show what kind of commitments to that fact they have made in the past. I think you're also over-estimating how hard it is to flag something as not-necessary for the majority of users. Especially when downloading a fresh copy of a new expansion. If you know most players aren't going to be in the final boss lair for 3 weeks but still ship the game with that content it's not unimaginable to just allow the game to download those files in the background.
      - fbdab103 3y ago
        Gaming industry is notoriously crunch time. Feels a hard ask to spend any resources on partially downloaded gameplay vs the mountain of bugs which likely exist in the non-quantum state of download-or-not.
      - whartung 3y ago
        Blizzards downloaded is top tier. The startup time from initial, bare bones install to playable is very fast. It starts with placeholder content to get you running, and anything immediately necessary for your area. For example, if you’re in a capital city, it doesn’t wait to download the entire city, just where you are. It can rough out the other areas and add details almost in real time as you start making your way through it. Things get more difficult if you mount up and start flying more world to load, but even still it doesn’t load it all. There’s certainly a cost, there can be FPS loss during busy areas, but by the time you get to something important, it should all be loaded. Contrived example is you’re in a raid, some reason you feel you need to reinstall, you could do that, fire up the game, it’ll load the raid and by the time you hit the first boss, it’ll all be there. This will take minutes. Since I leave the client running, it updates in the background. During new releases it starts to download the entirety of the new release a couple of weeks before it’s due, to get the bulk of the content down. When they cut the release, it’s typically a much smaller update to turn the new content on. I rarely have to wait to play the game. Experiencing a few other games makes me really appreciate the work Blizzard had done in this regard. It’s top drawer.
- meristohm 3y ago
  I'm in the USA with 3mbps average download speed. Fine for streaming, but when I used to play games and my friends wanted to switch to a large game (Sea of Theft, say, or Rat Slaughter 2, whatever they're called) I'd set it to download overnight. I don't consider this a problem.
cma 3y ago
It would be faster to drive to a store, buy the game, and bring it back, I think you want to at least beat out that.
- yCombLinks 3y ago
  In which you open the case and proceed to do a giant download.
  - yetihehe 3y ago
    Or. like with installing gt7 on ps4 from disc, you wait about 1 hour to install, then you can put second disk, and play a small version of game until it install the rest (0.5h), then it restarts and you can again play small version until it downloads and installs update (another 15min). Best of both worlds I guess...
justinclift 3y ago
> I get 10MBPs (megabytes) down reliably from Steam Ahhh, that's interesting. Personally, I've relocated to Brisbane recently and the NBN connections up here go to 1Gb/s (!). I'm on a 400Mbps plan, with downloads of .isos from mirrors (etc) routinely being 40-50MB/s. But the fastest downloads from Steam (using Brisbane download server) are 5-6MB/s, which really sucks. :( :(
- pcchristie 3y ago
  Very interesting, I didn't know many people got > 100mpbs without paying for the infra. I am going off the fact that (as you may have seen in the news) a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount (majority?) of consumers could possibly pay for that without realising they'd never get it. After that made the news I noticed much more prominent caveats on 100mbps tiers, and many telcos dropped their top plan to 75mbps or even 50. I didn't realise some places were genuinely getting 1Gbps. Amazing!
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount ... never get it. Ahhh, yeah. I'm with Launtel (https://launtel.net.au https://launtel.net.au), who seem to be extremely technically clueful and the opposite of the shady places that are around (Dodo, etc). So I've been with them in Melb, Syd, and now Brisbane. Melb speed was 100/40, Syd was 50/20, and here is Bris currently on 400/50. At all locations, the download speed has been "as advertised" or better. Technically the connection here can do 1000/50, and when I tested it the download rates were in the 80-90MB/s range for various things (isos, etc). But that's $15 (AUD) extra per month while 40-50MB/s is totally fine for my purposes. :) Really wish Steam downloads were faster than 5-6MB/s though. :/
    - nhinck 3y ago
      Have you played around with what region you're downloading from? You can change it manually and it may be worth checking out whether or not Sydney/Melbourne offer better download speeds than Brisbane.
monkeywork 3y ago
If you have large drives then you can have best of both worlds where it downloads and caches your most used stuff without you having to wait for a full download to start playing, and then next time you play it's already downloaded.
averageRoyalty 3y ago
> I'm in Australia and get 90-100 mbps, which is half of the demo speed, and I would be an upper outlier in this country. This incorrect, although commonly repeated as we love as a country to collectively moan. Shadow leader at the time Albo was fact checked on this 2 years ago[1], and we clocked in at 82.58mbps back then. We now sit 16th at 96.05mbps[2]. 1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/fact-check-albanese-broadband-speeds-nbn-59th-in-the-world/100663930 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/fact-check-albanese-b... 2. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

NikolaNovak 3y ago

Right. 2.5 hours initial wait to then play a game normally is... fine. It's a non issue for most folks:) I noticed Battle.net from BLizzard tracks couple of thresholds in the progress bar - when the game will be fully downloaded, but also when the game is playable. For many updates, those two thresholds are very close together; but occasionally, the "playable" is half the distance or less of "completed", which makes me think somebody there is still putting in the effort :)

MBCook 3y ago
PS5 has a similar system to let you start playing (properly designed) games before downloading is complete. I know iOS has something like that, though o don’t think I’ve ever seen it used. And I’d expect Xbox does as well, but I’m not in that ecosystem so I don’t know as much about their features.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  That sounds like a lot of engineering effort for something with minimal payoff. Carefully balancing early vs late offsets for the one time payoff of playing while the game is still downloading. So many potential failure states vs just saying, "Wait another hour and then start"
  - Skullfurious 3y ago
    To you it might sound like a lot of effort but for a user who is on his 1 day off for the week not having to wait twice the amount of time to log in to play his game probably means more than you or I could ever imagine. Blizzard used to be about making everyone have an excellent experience and some of the legacy features they've had for years seriously still do show what kind of commitments to that fact they have made in the past. I think you're also over-estimating how hard it is to flag something as not-necessary for the majority of users. Especially when downloading a fresh copy of a new expansion. If you know most players aren't going to be in the final boss lair for 3 weeks but still ship the game with that content it's not unimaginable to just allow the game to download those files in the background.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      Gaming industry is notoriously crunch time. Feels a hard ask to spend any resources on partially downloaded gameplay vs the mountain of bugs which likely exist in the non-quantum state of download-or-not.
    - whartung 3y ago
      Blizzards downloaded is top tier. The startup time from initial, bare bones install to playable is very fast. It starts with placeholder content to get you running, and anything immediately necessary for your area. For example, if you’re in a capital city, it doesn’t wait to download the entire city, just where you are. It can rough out the other areas and add details almost in real time as you start making your way through it. Things get more difficult if you mount up and start flying more world to load, but even still it doesn’t load it all. There’s certainly a cost, there can be FPS loss during busy areas, but by the time you get to something important, it should all be loaded. Contrived example is you’re in a raid, some reason you feel you need to reinstall, you could do that, fire up the game, it’ll load the raid and by the time you hit the first boss, it’ll all be there. This will take minutes. Since I leave the client running, it updates in the background. During new releases it starts to download the entirety of the new release a couple of weeks before it’s due, to get the bulk of the content down. When they cut the release, it’s typically a much smaller update to turn the new content on. I rarely have to wait to play the game. Experiencing a few other games makes me really appreciate the work Blizzard had done in this regard. It’s top drawer.
meristohm 3y ago
I'm in the USA with 3mbps average download speed. Fine for streaming, but when I used to play games and my friends wanted to switch to a large game (Sea of Theft, say, or Rat Slaughter 2, whatever they're called) I'd set it to download overnight. I don't consider this a problem.

cma 3y ago

It would be faster to drive to a store, buy the game, and bring it back, I think you want to at least beat out that.

yCombLinks 3y ago
In which you open the case and proceed to do a giant download.
- yetihehe 3y ago
  Or. like with installing gt7 on ps4 from disc, you wait about 1 hour to install, then you can put second disk, and play a small version of game until it install the rest (0.5h), then it restarts and you can again play small version until it downloads and installs update (another 15min). Best of both worlds I guess...

justinclift 3y ago

> I get 10MBPs (megabytes) down reliably from Steam Ahhh, that's interesting. Personally, I've relocated to Brisbane recently and the NBN connections up here go to 1Gb/s (!). I'm on a 400Mbps plan, with downloads of .isos from mirrors (etc) routinely being 40-50MB/s. But the fastest downloads from Steam (using Brisbane download server) are 5-6MB/s, which really sucks. :( :(

pcchristie 3y ago
Very interesting, I didn't know many people got > 100mpbs without paying for the infra. I am going off the fact that (as you may have seen in the news) a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount (majority?) of consumers could possibly pay for that without realising they'd never get it. After that made the news I noticed much more prominent caveats on 100mbps tiers, and many telcos dropped their top plan to 75mbps or even 50. I didn't realise some places were genuinely getting 1Gbps. Amazing!
- justinclift 3y ago
  > a lot of ISPs got in trouble for advertising and selling 100mbps when a huge amount ... never get it. Ahhh, yeah. I'm with Launtel (https://launtel.net.au https://launtel.net.au), who seem to be extremely technically clueful and the opposite of the shady places that are around (Dodo, etc). So I've been with them in Melb, Syd, and now Brisbane. Melb speed was 100/40, Syd was 50/20, and here is Bris currently on 400/50. At all locations, the download speed has been "as advertised" or better. Technically the connection here can do 1000/50, and when I tested it the download rates were in the 80-90MB/s range for various things (isos, etc). But that's $15 (AUD) extra per month while 40-50MB/s is totally fine for my purposes. :) Really wish Steam downloads were faster than 5-6MB/s though. :/
  - nhinck 3y ago
    Have you played around with what region you're downloading from? You can change it manually and it may be worth checking out whether or not Sydney/Melbourne offer better download speeds than Brisbane.

monkeywork 3y ago

If you have large drives then you can have best of both worlds where it downloads and caches your most used stuff without you having to wait for a full download to start playing, and then next time you play it's already downloaded.

averageRoyalty 3y ago

> I'm in Australia and get 90-100 mbps, which is half of the demo speed, and I would be an upper outlier in this country. This incorrect, although commonly repeated as we love as a country to collectively moan. Shadow leader at the time Albo was fact checked on this 2 years ago[1], and we clocked in at 82.58mbps back then. We now sit 16th at 96.05mbps[2]. 1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/fact-check-albanese-broadband-speeds-nbn-59th-in-the-world/100663930 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/fact-check-albanese-b... 2. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index