I love Tower Unite, I love all the developers who put a lot in love in it, I even planning to create my own credit card so I can support them further.
I was reading latest update and I was very hype in this update for rigging reasons, and this is where it breaks my hype when I read that low bandwidth has been removed.
For all these years I was following your works all the time and I keep playing this game for fun without worrying about 12-15 GB download each update whether it’s hotfix or not.
This is huge shame for whoever made decision for removing this branch especially for people like me who got limited amount of GB to download per month (mine is 140).
I demand to return it back, whether it improves optimization or not. I would rather wait for hours in loading Plaza than wasting alot of my internet plan GBs.
With our recent Unreal Engine version upgrade, and backend changes on Valve’s end, updates to the PAK are much smaller than they initially were when the feature rolled out, as Steam is better at determining which chunks of the PAK changed and which didn’t.
This update in particular was going to be large regardless as it had a bunch of re-built lighting across many maps, as well as plaza changes.
The branch was removed to streamline our build process, as it would delay us massively as an entire extra hour was required to build the non-PAK version of the game.
Future updates aren’t going to be 12-15 GB. We took this into consideration when making this decision. In previous updates to PAK they’ve been around 150-600 MB downloads.
We also have been scheduling our updates to occur every other week, with exceptions to hot fixes (which are generally very small in file size).
I agree with OP. Would have been nice for a poll first to let us know, even if “Remove lowbandwidth” woulda won.
Also, this change makes stuff like GMod Tower Music Pack for TU! unusuable, which is a shame :c
In our experience internally as we make builds multiple times per day, and once every night, it depends on what is changed, but it’s never greater than a GB. Now, if the hotfix has changes to the Plaza, it’s going to be larger than if there isn’t, but that was true even on the non-PAK version.
I would say most of the time internally each build differs generally around 50MB, but again this depends on what’s changed.
Regardless, the old wisdom of having to download the entire PAK all over again is no longer correct, and while updates might be slightly larger (by a couple tens of MB), they won’t be 14GB (unless of course we touched literally every single file in the game which has never happened).
Well, that’s a relief to hear. Hopefully you won’t rapidly update the game (with exception of hotfixes and non-PAK updates.), Right now I’m still downloading the update. Thanks for your time and sorry about that.
I was a lowbandwidth branch user not because of a particularly slow internet connection but because the pak updates were significantly bigger than non-pak updates. Comparing with a friend who used pak, pak updates were never the full pak size but were often 2x the size of lowbandwidth, especially large for hotfixes. To me that was excessive and as I received no loading time benefit from pak it wasn’t worth it. For me I’d be looking for a maximum of say 20% larger for 1GB+ updates, or 200MB larger for under 1GB updates.
If you’ve got it sorted so pak is now comparable to what lowbandwidth then that’s great news! Is there a link to documentation about the change on the Unreal Engine end? I’m interested in reading about how it works.