I knew they were depots, but not that they were layered like that, that’s interesting.
Here’s another fact that you might find interesting: when Witcher 2 released, it was about 12GB IIRC, but the entire game was in only a few files because the bulk of all assets were in one large file. Makes things really easy to manage and package up, but Steam didn’t have the ability to patch files, it had to be a full file replacement. So when the first update came out, everyone lost their minds at a 10GB update. Yeah, we don’t bat an eye now at updates that are this big, but back then people were on slow connections, even dial up or DSL < 3mbps.
It was from this that Valve decided to work on Steam’s ability to incrementally patch individual files. The next Witcher 2 update was < 100MB.
I knew they were depots, but not that they were layered like that, that’s interesting.
Here’s another fact that you might find interesting: when Witcher 2 released, it was about 12GB IIRC, but the entire game was in only a few files because the bulk of all assets were in one large file. Makes things really easy to manage and package up, but Steam didn’t have the ability to patch files, it had to be a full file replacement. So when the first update came out, everyone lost their minds at a 10GB update. Yeah, we don’t bat an eye now at updates that are this big, but back then people were on slow connections, even dial up or DSL < 3mbps.
It was from this that Valve decided to work on Steam’s ability to incrementally patch individual files. The next Witcher 2 update was < 100MB.