Small patches aren't small!!

[andrewwilson]

Hello,

I purchased Visual Patch on the basis that it allows us to do what we need to do with the interface for our patches; namely, it allows us to not have one.

But! A totally silent patch that has updates only one 43k file still creates a patch of at least 500k. The way we do patches (lots of little ones), this is an insane waste of bandwidth.

Am I missing something? My patch has no screens, uses the default theme, has silent mode enabled, starts in silent mode, has no background, no resources (except the global lua functions include)...

[Lorne]

That's the overhead of the screen engine, scripting engine, actions, etc. Visual Patch 2.0 was designed to be something of a swiss army knife, able to handle very advanced and complicated patching needs.

You're right though, for single small files, the overhead of the "exe" part is unfortunate. The actual diffs for small files are tiny.

The DeltaMAX patching engine itself is also available separately as an ActiveX control/DLL if you want to create a custom solution without all the overhead that goes with Visual Patch's complexity. In fact it even comes with a few sample applications (with full source) that can be used as utilities for patching individual files.

Patching is generally done on very large files or large numbers of small files, so the overhead of the Visual Patch 2.0 runtime executable isn't normally a problem. (Even with that overhead patches for large files usually end up smaller than patches built with other tools.)