Strategy for distribution of large games (> 5GB)?
Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2024 12:19 pm
By the time we're done with our game this fall, its package size will be somewhere around 8GB. This is mainly due to the sheer number of images being used. We're already distributing a version with JPG backgrounds instead of the premium WEBP images, and are optimizing image sizes down as best we can while keeping the image quality as high as possible.
Most file hosting sites limit downloads to 5GB, and some (notably Mega.nz) have daily caps, so we'd like to keep under that limit.
The original strategy was to distribute using a multi-part ZIP or RAR file format. Windows File Explorer, though, gets very confused with multi-part ZIP files. People expect to just right-click on a ZIP file to extract it, and that doesn't work. (Not only that, it doesn't tell you why it doesn't work...) Windows can't handle RAR files without a third-party utility. Then, there's the issue of players only downloading one of the files and having extraction fail without understanding why.
The next idea was to break the game into multiple archives and have the player copy them to the right place after downloading. That confused a lot of people and we ended up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to walk them through the process. We gave up on that idea.
We even toyed with the idea of building our own installer that could reconstruct the game from multiple files, but gave up on that because now there would be two separate apps we'd have to support across multiple platforms.
The game will ultimately be distributed on Steam, so it'll be less of an issue then, but this must have come up before with some of the devs here. If I could pick your brain, what methods have you used for distributing really large Ren'Py games?
Most file hosting sites limit downloads to 5GB, and some (notably Mega.nz) have daily caps, so we'd like to keep under that limit.
The original strategy was to distribute using a multi-part ZIP or RAR file format. Windows File Explorer, though, gets very confused with multi-part ZIP files. People expect to just right-click on a ZIP file to extract it, and that doesn't work. (Not only that, it doesn't tell you why it doesn't work...) Windows can't handle RAR files without a third-party utility. Then, there's the issue of players only downloading one of the files and having extraction fail without understanding why.
The next idea was to break the game into multiple archives and have the player copy them to the right place after downloading. That confused a lot of people and we ended up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to walk them through the process. We gave up on that idea.
We even toyed with the idea of building our own installer that could reconstruct the game from multiple files, but gave up on that because now there would be two separate apps we'd have to support across multiple platforms.
The game will ultimately be distributed on Steam, so it'll be less of an issue then, but this must have come up before with some of the devs here. If I could pick your brain, what methods have you used for distributing really large Ren'Py games?