#file sizes

There are two answers to this - the short term and long term issues with install size.

The short term answer is that we generally only need the hard drive space for a single patch temporarily - once the patch is applied and your game is up to date we can safely delete the patch since its purpose is fulfilled and it is no longer needed. If the patch contains replacement assets, the patch can delete the old assets and replace them with the new. However, many patches add new content - new assets, new environments, new textures, and so on - and they do so permanently. While this won’t necessarily be the same size as the entire patch, they will take up additional hard drive space. This leads us to the long term issues.

As live games mature and new content gets added to them, their installed size tends to increase in order to support all of the permanent post-launch content in addition to the launch content. This can cause a mature game to take up an much larger amount of hard drive space than when they started. Higher end mobile games (e.g. Genshin Impact) are especially susceptible to this problem due to the increased processing capability of mobile devices outpacing their relatively small storage capacities. Most mobile games in this situation will selectively delete old/unused assets to save space and then re-download them on demand if the player decides to engage with that content. It's also one reason why mobile games have so much seasonal content - once the season is over, most of the assets can be deleted in order to make room for the next.

Bungie actually had to deal with this very problem for Destiny 2 - their old expansion content took up many gigabytes of hard drive space but the vast majority of players (~99.7%) didn't regularly play that old content. They took the mobile game solution - they created the "Destiny Vault", where they would "retire" old and unused expansion content on a regular basis in order to keep the game's install size manageable for current players. Then, as the case warranted, they could periodically bring back popular old expansion content (and even update/retune it for modern gameplay paradigms) and still keep room for new content.

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Try resetting FireAlpaca - instructions here.

Note: There is a possibility the previously saved file is already corrupted.

However, that’s an enormous file for FireAlpaca (or most paint programs), as a 32-bit program it can only access about 3GB of memory maximum and a single layer at that size would use about 1GB memory on its own if it was full. Add an Undo or two and FireAlpaca has run out of memory.

At 300 dpi printed, that’s a poster about 5 feet by 4.5 feet in size in very fine detail (most posters that size are printed at only about 50 to 100 dpi because people aren’t viewing them from a few inches away). At typical 96 ppi monitor size, you’d need a monitor about 15 feet by 14 feet to display it at normal size.

I recommend you install and use FireAlpaca’s sibling program, MediBang Paint Pro (use the 64-bit version), to open and work with the file, and if you need to work with such large sizes. It will read FireAlpaca’s .mdp files, and as a 64-bit program it will handle as much memory as your computer can provide. Professional print/image services that work with those size files typically have 32GB or more memory in their computers (working memory, not storage space) to reduce those types of crashes.

I doubt it. You can generally tell what’s in a patch by its relative size. Big patches include asset changes. Small patches are only code changes. Cyberpunk probably has a lot of asset changes in it for various bug fixes.

Code is just text that’s been compiled and linked down to machine language, so it tends to be very small - just take a look at the executable size of any PC game you’ve got installed and you’ll see it is usually only a megabyte or two at most. We usually change code for bug fixes on a live game, since we trust the engineers more than any other discipline to make changes to the game while maintaining stability. Code changes comprise the rules and behavior of the game, so things that may have behaved one way will now behave differently. This also generally includes numerical data - stats and abilities are generally represented as text in the files, so changes like “this ability does X more damage” and “that character now has Y ability instead of X ability” are also likely to be in the small-file camp unless it involves visual asset changes or additions.

Assets like models, textures, and audio can’t be compressed down as much as code or text can, so they take the lion’s share of any patch’s file size. Each of those types of files can be multiple megabytes on its own (or even bigger, in audio’s case), so any changes to assets (e.g. adjusting a seizure-inducing visual effect so it doesn’t induce seizures so much anymore) will greatly increase the size of a patch. Assets change the way the game looks and sounds and are usually included alongside changes to the rules.

The general rule of thumb is this: 

If the patch is only a few megabytes or less, it’s probably just code changes. There are always code changes.

If it’s in the tens or hundreds of megabytes, it’s changing or adding some assets in addition to the code changes.

If it’s in the gigabytes, it’s changing or adding a lot of assets in addition to the code changes.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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