What comes in a large update?

[electric mayhem]

Firstly, please do not take this question as negative critique, this is actually mere curiousity and awareness of trying to better understand what I and others spend countless hours of our time in.

Is someone able to explain in laymans terms what exactly comes in a 1.8GB update, or any other large update for that matter?
Or why they are so large?
How is the file changed or structured?

We see on the updates list items describing what would appear at first glance, pretty simple things."Disable this, correct that, add this to a damage calc" etc.
These don't "Feel" like large amounts of change to a computer file "mass".

Take for instance, a 4000 word research essay would come to a few hundred kb. Add images embedded images, up to a couple MB.
Video files... MBs/GBs. A whole nother kettle of fish.

How are our small changes to our files so large?

Or is it merely that we are making changes to our base tlk (and other format) files and we have to replace them wholely. The full size has to be redownloaded. And not just the bits that have changed?

Being the experts in the field, I imagine you've already asked yourselves the question. But is there a better way where only we have to redownload the small portions of updated files, and not the whole files again? Thereby allowing for quicker downloads etc? (Yes, i know some people have fibre to the premises and GB/s download sync speeds. Some of us suffer 6000kbps sync speeds).
Or because of the structure of the game itself that is not possible?


Thanks in advance

[PiaMango]

To my understanding any changes to a files requires that file to be redownloaded. Most of the server file size is made up by hak files which contain info for things like hair styles (~200mb) items (50-100mb each x6) etc. So each time a new hairstyle is added the whole hak need to be redownloaded.

So a large update does not necessarily mean large changes, it could just be minor changes across the board.

[Lockonnow]

we dont need more hair

[Aspect of Sorrow]

There was an attempt at a hakless solution but there were a myriad of issues and had to roll it all back.

[electric mayhem]

Thanks for the replies.
Good answers, and hopefully may help others understand this in the future.

[NeOmega]

But Im still paying by the megabyte with AOL.





XD

I started a thread asking, because I had been gone for two years, and I thought perhaps my original download was corrupted or something, or it was doing it all over again unnecessarily.

[Thorsson]

we dont need more hair

QFT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqomZQMZQCQ

Just replace badges with hair.