i read about this a while ago and iirc it depends on how devs prepare the update, picture this
folder/textures/
Theres 2 files in textures folder, a 5gb and 20gb one, 5gb one is useless. Devs could just update the game in a way to only remove 5gb file or reinstall the entire textures folder but this time you only download the 20gb folder
This also ensures theres no missing files from the update i believe
The standard is to download the new file, verify it downloaded correctly, and then delete the old one. That way you need enough storage to hold both, and then after you will get the storage back. Developers can’t control when your network connection might go down, so they don’t want to delete the old content and then leave you with a broken game.
This stuff isn’t normally stored as a just a big folder of individual files but fairly carefully bundled content that will be loaded together in single files. One of the bigger bottlenecks in modern games is loading times and these are techniques to address that.
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i read about this a while ago and iirc it depends on how devs prepare the update, picture this
folder/textures/
Theres 2 files in textures folder, a 5gb and 20gb one, 5gb one is useless. Devs could just update the game in a way to only remove 5gb file or reinstall the entire textures folder but this time you only download the 20gb folder
This also ensures theres no missing files from the update i believe
Because you need a temporary place to put it.
The standard is to download the new file, verify it downloaded correctly, and then delete the old one. That way you need enough storage to hold both, and then after you will get the storage back. Developers can’t control when your network connection might go down, so they don’t want to delete the old content and then leave you with a broken game.
This stuff isn’t normally stored as a just a big folder of individual files but fairly carefully bundled content that will be loaded together in single files. One of the bigger bottlenecks in modern games is loading times and these are techniques to address that.