Feedback on recent, and future updates

stburr91

I'm going to touch on an issues that I know not everyone will agree with, but an issue that should be discussed.

While I very much appreciate the continued development of the CDLC, and the additional content, however, the size of the CDLC has gotten quite large (in terms of gigabytes), and this is on top of the very large size of the official BI content. I simply do not have room on my hard drive for 20 gig updates, especially updates that don't add a lot to the game. Now don't misunderstand me, there is nothing wrong with the content that was recently added, but for me, and many others I suspect, 5 different variants of a Tommy gun doesn't add a lot to the game. I would also say the same thing about the new Khe Sanh terrain, it's a great terrain, but it's just too similar to Cam Lao Nam, it just doesn't add enough "new" to justify the hard drive space.

I'm not sure what the plans may be for future updates, but the size of future updates should be carefully considered, and content only added if it really fills a hole in the CDLC, or adds some completely new gameplay opportunities.

I don't know what the answer is, maybe move the new terrain to the Steam workshop as a mod, or if any future terrains are planned, release them as mods, rather than official content of the CDLC that forces the owners to download them.

I know the people that are still playing the CDLC on a daily basis, and have plenty of room on their hard drives will not agree with this, but let's not forget, many people don't want to have the extreme hard drive space commitments for a game that is 8 years old, and is on a 20 year old game engine.

While I would love to have the Mig, Skyraider, PBR, Jolly Green Giant, and M113 that everyone wants, but 5 variants of WWII guns, and terrains that are the same as Cam Lao Nam, I just don't have the hard drive space for that type of content.

Anyway, I hope this is taken as intended, as genuine feedback, and not as a criticism of the hard work the dev team is putting into their CDLC.

NightIntruder

stburr91 wrote:
the size of the CDLC has gotten quite large (in terms of gigabytes), and this is on top of the very large size of the official BI content. I simply do not have room on my hard drive for 20 gig updates, especially updates that don't add a lot to the game.

I feel your pain, mate. Recently, had to archive ca.50GB of my addon projects and uninstall GM mod (along with some of the official DLCs) as well as unsubscribe many large addons from SW, including Unsung mod (!!! better TeTeT won't see this). All of that basically to be able to save a space for another game, just to check it. Already my Arma3 installation folder with samples and tools occupies like 106GB and used to be much, much larger.
That being said, I think that quality in games costs a lot of storage space, nowadays. There's no alternative, really. Sure, we can wonder why there are a few dozens of hand weapons and no single A-1 or HH-3H, but ... oh well.. I think that all comes down to the main focus of the DLC which is MACV SOG. SOF guys love their handcrafted pew-pew toys 😉
What's more, we should be prepared for another fat update in the future, I assume. I hope it won't include a terrain as most likely not much of ppl asked for more variety (of a jungle) in this regard 😉

Soapbox0331

[MENTION=371]stburr91[/MENTION] I can't speak to the storage size issue. I use Unsung Redux Stable mod with SOG DLC which provides all the Skyraiders, Jolly Greens, and a lot more.

stburr91

NightIntruder wrote:
I feel your pain, mate. Recently, had to archive ca.50GB of my addon projects and uninstall GM mod (along with some of the official DLCs) as well as unsubscribe many large addons from SW, including Unsung mod (!!! better TeTeT won't see this). All of that basically to be able to save a space for another game, just to check it. Already my Arma3 installation folder with samples and tools occupies like 106GB and used to be much, much larger.
That being said, I think that quality in games costs a lot of storage space, nowadays. There's no alternative, really. Sure, we can wonder why there are a few dozens of hand weapons and no single A-1 or HH-3H, but ... oh well.. I think that all comes down to the main focus of the DLC which is MACV SOG. SOF guys love their handcrafted pew-pew toys 😉
What's more, we should be prepared for another fat update in the future, I assume. I hope it won't include a terrain as most likely not much of ppl asked for more variety (of a jungle) in this regard 😉

Yeah, large file sizes are just the reality of games nowadays. I just wanted to mention this because I know I'm not the only one with the issue of limited hard drive space, and as you mentioned, there will likely be more updates, so we will be crossing this bridge again.

I think the point I wanted to touch on here is that it's not just the size of the CDLC, but to put it in proper context. We aren't talking about huge hard drive commitments for the latest brand new game that everyone would be happy to dedicate the space for, we are talking about a game that is over 8 years old, and is on a 20 year old game engine. The truth of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Arma 3 owners are either not playing the game much anymore, if at all.

I guess my point is that if the devs are not careful about file size commitments of the CDLC, the alternative is that people are forced to uninstall the CDLC, and then what good is the update if people remove it.

NightIntruder

Honestly speaking, my problem is rather my lack of motivation to save a space for this ever-expanding game. And it results directly from the constantly weakening feeling of belonging to the Arma 3 community. I have devoted 20 years of my life to this series, half of which on exploring the secrets of modding, and I think that's enough. This series is over, and even the finest DLCs will not change that, even if they add another map to the thousand already available to SW subscribers, another dozen of weapons to the seventeen hundreds stored there, or another plane to the whole fat collection freely available for the arma players. This is probably called satiation 😉

Hoot

I understand the storage space issue. Nowadays games are huge and requires lots of space.
That said, I think it's a bit dishonest to say the new update took 20gb more of your storage space. I mean at launch the DLC was what roughly 22-23gb. Now it says my DLC folders size is 25gb. So it's not exactly like the update added 20gb on top of your already 20gb or so of CDLC. At worst, the 1.1 update added 5gb to your game folder. (which in reality probably less than that).

stburr91

Hoot wrote:
I understand the storage space issue. Nowadays games are huge and requires lots of space.
That said, I think it's a bit dishonest to say the new update took 20gb more of your storage space. I mean at launch the DLC was what roughly 22-23gb. Now it says my DLC folders size is 25gb. So it's not exactly like the update added 20gb on top of your already 20gb or so of CDLC. At worst, the 1.1 update added 5gb to your game folder. (which in reality probably less than that).

OK, fair enough, I did think is was a little strange that this updates was 20+ gigs, I guess the original content was re-downloaded during the update.

Still, the issue remains, using gigs of hard drive space for 5 variants of a WWII gun, and a terrain that is for all intents, and purposes, the same as Cam Lao Nam, may not be the best use of hard drive space considering that most are playing Arma very little, if at all anymore.

My point of course isn't that the devs shouldn't add content, I'm just saying maybe be more cognizant of the file size of updates, and put out content that really adds something to the DLC, and not pushing updates just to add something "new".

Hoot

You're right about the original content, at least I think it's due to the DLC files being ebo's and being encrypted or something, it makes it so that Steam can't really download/update the part of the files that have been changed and it has to re download the whole files in their entirety.
I see your point, though I don't really mind the storage issue, I don't play that much of other games due to my system being old and I don't have much time to play anyway these days.
That said, maybe the Devs felt the thompsons variants aswell the new terrain really added something to the dlc. I mean, they most likely think a lot about what to add, and thus what to spend their development money on. But their idea of what adds something to the DLC and yours might differ. Hopefully the next update will add stuff that you think really adds to the DLC and that is worth a few gigs on your hard drive. If vanilla Arma had more modularity, I would want to remove a whole bunch of stuff I don't use either to make some room too.

HorribleGoat

[MENTION=371]stburr91[/MENTION]

Due to how Steam updating works with EBO files (the DLC data containers), when we update something the whole EBO gets downloaded again. So if we do a small tweak to helicopter textures the download size is 1.42GB. And due to lot of fixes across different EBO containers the download size can be 20GB.
However the install size does not increase 20GB each time such update happens.

Since release largest addition has been Khe Sanh map for about 900Mb to the overall install disk space size.

So what you download is mostly replacing the old data. not adding on top of it.