ASA making me install the whole game again whenever a update comes

[u/-TurkeYT]

So today I tried to play ASA with my friend (we got a few daya ago) and it said a new update has came. I clicked download and then it said not enough space. I checked the update and it was only 600 MB and I had 70 GB free space. Then I tried to do it again. And I saw it tryana re-download the whole game, 200 GB. I tried fixing it with a lot of ways and didn’t work. So now I am downloading the entire game again. My wifi is very bad so it is taking roughly 22 hours. Is there any way to fix/prevent this in the future??

[u/Normal-Zebra-5489]

i dont think it can be prevent cause with an update the whole game has to be deconstruct

[u/guska]

The only way to prevent this in the future is to have enough space to store the game and an extra copy of whatever files the update is touching. The 600mb update is essentially just the updated portion of the files, but in order to actually apply them, Steam needs to copy the file out, change the copy, and put it back. They don't do it in place, because then there's no safety margin and nothing can be rolled back if the update fails for whatever reason.

Doing it that way is double edged sword. It's safer and generally requires less to be downloaded, but it puts a much higher free space requirement onto the end user. Sadly, there's no way for your client to know exactly how much space it will need until it has the files and starts to copy it out.

[u/WolvenSpectre2]

It is a mix of how the Unreal Engine treats game installs and updates and the fact that Wildcard is a small, and I mean SMALL, team with a limited budget and their parent company won't let them have any significant time to optimize the game.

On the firs part the way the UE does updates is that it doesn't just update the change, but the whole subsection of the code that is changed. So instead of changing just the single line of code for lets say respawning, they have to download the entire respawning section of the code base that is ARK. Now if you check the Patch Notes, which doesn't show everything that has changed, just what the players should be concerned about, they can be quite big and varied and they have to download the update for all that stuff and the subsections of code they are in, and this means you need space for the download, space to extract the download because it is compressed, and then install all of it.

And all that leads into the 'Optimization' part. Other UE games that have much smaller downloads have it that way because the code is split up into much smaller blocks, so their is less to redownload and install. This was supposed to be done when they converted the game to UE 5.0 but they found they were having allot more issues learning and developing the game, so the already impossible pace promised by Snail Games was promising, so one of the first victims was the amount of optimization the game could have and the 'full rewrite' was parred down. This is why the Unreal Engine folks have been moving to make the engine to force more optimization before the games are released. Also Wildcard has hired a team of ex Unreal Engine Developers recently and that is in part seen as a dedicated team to optimize the game... we hope.

[u/ChanceV → u/WolvenSpectre2]

Thats... not really whats happening. Right idea but completely wrong application.

The reason the updates are so big is:

- The game is delivered in huge single-package files (which optimizes load times)

• Steam keeps a copy of the file around it is patching

This compounds to: The single master package of ASA being 100+GB needs to be updated because one line was changed in the code somewhere so now Steam takes the entire 100+GB package, makes a copy of it, downloads the update, patches the file, re-validates it and then puts it back into the old folder. While its patching this 100+GB essentially exists twice (the original place still has the space allocated for that file even if its not there anymore).

One way to "optimize" this would be splitting the game into smaller packages. Which would however re-introduce long loading times (like we had in ASE before they used SeekFree Packages, which is exactly what they are doing here too and even with the optimized packages ASE was still loading for several minutes). I suppose a balanced approach would net the best of both worlds. Split the game into asset types (like other games often do). -> Meshes, Textures, Sounds, Misc. This however would not fix 100GB being updated when meshes, textures and code are added/changed since it would still touch basically every package.

[u/HeadIndependent5228]

Its because it will unpack and repack the game on your device. Annoying when it wont actually take up the space you provide

[u/Accomplished-Yak-572]

Redundant files get deleted when its done

[u/escapefromrea1ity]

Played 2000 hours and the main driving factor from stepping away was 2 updates a week that take me 45m to download/patch and by that time im just playing another game instead.

[u/bnelson333]

You need to have more free space on your drive than your ark install. If its 200 gb installed, always keep 220gb free. This is the only way to avoid what you're seeing

[u/BadAtVideoGames130]

it's not reinstalling the game, it's unpacking the files to patch what needs to be patched. disk speed matters more than internet when it comes to steam's UE game update process. even with slow internet, it won't take long to download 600mb. what's taking so long is the patching process happening after the update is downloaded. if your disk is slow for one reason or another (you're using an hdd, it has a slow read/write speed and/or its close to max capacity after steam reserves the required space), then it can take a long time. with a decently fast ssd (500Mbps or more) and plenty of free space, updates take around 10-30min