Having dabbled in trying to make a quick delta patch system like Steam's, which required me to understand delta patching methods and made small patches to big files in a 10gb+ installation in a few seconds, this is sure is quite interesting!
I wonder if Steam ever decides to supercharge their content handling with some user-space filesystem stuff. With fast connections, there isn't really a reason they couldn't launch games in seconds, streaming data on-demand with smart pre-caching steering based on automatically trained access pattern data. And especially with finely tuned delta patching like this, online game pauses for patching could be almost entirely eliminated. Stop & go instead of a pit stop.
Someone already created that[1] using custom kernel driver and there own CDN, but they seem to of abandoned it[2], maybe because they would of attracted Valve's wrath trying to monetized it.
That's actually quite interesting. Not entirely what I had in mind but close! My version would have only the first boot be a bit slow, but the aspect of dynamically replacing local content there is cool.
This would be extra cool for LAN parties with good network hardware
Well, the amount of compression isn't set in stone, obviously a system like this would run with a less compressed dataset to balance game boot time, time taken away from running the game by compression, and scale on available bandwidth.
With low bandwidth just downloading the whole thing while having enough compression to 80% saturate the local system would be optimal instead, sure.
I wonder if Steam ever decides to supercharge their content handling with some user-space filesystem stuff. With fast connections, there isn't really a reason they couldn't launch games in seconds, streaming data on-demand with smart pre-caching steering based on automatically trained access pattern data. And especially with finely tuned delta patching like this, online game pauses for patching could be almost entirely eliminated. Stop & go instead of a pit stop.