Illarion.org

I just have a few questions....

First, what I see:
Every time I click on “play” in the launcher, it goes through a check, which takes time. Many seconds to several minutes. “Checking and updating application files”

Questions:

• -Does this check need to take place every day/every time “play” is clicked?
  -Are there updates happening daily?
  -Why does it take so long to verify I have the current version on my computer?
  -Is it doing more than just verifying?
  -Is it actually doing some form of an update every time I hit the “play” button?

It does take some time when a new update is loading. But if it is slow loading the basic checks, it is a good sign to me that my internet connection is running slow. It should not take more than a few seconds, 30 at most, if your connection is working properly.

What it does is a integrity check of all local files along with a version based up-to-date check with the server.

It is just the nature of the update system we are using right now that requires the time to launch. The up-side is that we can to partial updates and update the main client (a very small part ~5MB) and the massive graphics and sound part (~70MB) separately. Usually the smaller part is updated more regular.

The thing is: I could reduce the rate of update checks. Currently the update system handles all files as potentially out of date. So it checks everything. I could assume that everything that was checked within the last day/week/month is assumed to be up-to-date. But that may cause problems if we update the client and the server together in cases where the updates depend on each other. That happens during the rare changes of the networking protocol. But if such a case happens and the clients do not update, all hell breaks loose.

This entire updating thing is not a perfectly easy topic to handle. It does get easier when you only distribute the full packages and don't use partial updates. Because then checking a single file online would be sufficient. But that would require a complete change of our updater. And the current one is, after all not very fast, but very secure and stable. It has a lot of integrity checks that make very sure that all the files downloaded and stored locally are correct.

Nitram

It isn't broken, lets not dink around with it.

Thanks for the response.