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Under The Bonnet | Patch 11.2

Written by Parias on . Posted in Scattered Chatter, Under The Bonnet

Summary:

(As per \CitizenClient\Client_Release.id)

It’s finally that time again! Our last update was late February, so this is sure overdue. Understandably the developers have been incredibly busy trying to get the DFM (or “Arena Commander” if you prefer) release in order, so we can expect that any interim updates will be considerably less dramatic in nature until that comes out.

This patch serves as a good testament to this; we have a few new hangar additions to oogle over and a few code and functionality fixes, but the usual gamut of other updates (ship models and animations, loadout adjustments, etc) are absent. I’m even finding myself hard-pressed to find tangible content of significance to write about — but don’t worry, I’ll always find something.

There also seems to be quite the discussion about this patch being ~4GB in size. An actual under the hood analysis shows this really isn’t the case; it’s pretty common for the patcher to just assume your entire installation is invalid and it will actually force you to redownload the whole thing (particularly if you get a metadata error and a “Repair” option). The actual data-file differences between builds are much smaller in size.

Read on to see what’s new – and to see if you can unlock the mystery behind the enigmatic “Dumper’s Depot!”

Under The Bonnet | Patch 11.1

Written by Parias on . Posted in Scattered Chatter, Under The Bonnet

With each new build of the hangar module, I’ve been keeping my own dumps of the game folders, running diffs against the varying versions, and making internal notes just out of nerdy curiosity for what’s actually being changed under the hood. I figured I’d start sharing some of these results, as others might find this interesting too. I plan to make this a recurring thing with each new patch until it becomes impractical.

This won’t cover each and every single byte difference between builds – just major points of interest that I find in doing diff-comparisons; in particular things which might not have been directly mentioned in the patch notes. There’s also a LOT to manually go through between builds, so it’s likely that I’ll miss some things.

This will generally be a bit of a disorganized mess as it’s more or less a brain dump as I go, but I’ll try to keep things as neat as I can. Bear in mind as well that 99% of this document will be my own conjecture – I may (and likely will) be wrong about my interpretation of a lot of things.

 

Summary:

(As per \CitizenClient\Client_Release.id)

This is going to be a fairly short one, because the main focus on this update (which was put out so rapidly after the last one) was to add Oculus Rift support. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of free-floating configuration changes which account for this, and many of the integration bits are likely hardcoded into the EXE itself and beyond further analysis.

That being said, this latest patch did bring a few other surprising changes under the hood which I felt would be worth documenting – I’ll leave it up to you if this seems too redundant or not given how recently the last major update was put out. Read on for the details.

In particular, I’ll also call out right away that the Freelancer variants are now gone from the game data files, with only the core Freelancer version left behind. This seems consistent with the jovial fist-shaking Wingman allegedly did regarding the premature reveal during today’s Wingman’s Hangover.

Under the Bonnet | Patch 11

Written by Parias on . Posted in Scattered Chatter, Under The Bonnet

With each new build of the hangar module, I’ve been keeping my own dumps of the game folders, running diffs against the varying versions, and making internal notes just out of nerdy curiosity for what’s actually being changed under the hood. I figured I’d start sharing some of these results, as others might find this interesting too. I plan to make this a recurring thing with each new patch until it becomes impractical.

This won’t cover each and every single byte difference between builds – just major points of interest that I find in doing diff-comparisons; in particular things which might not have been directly mentioned in the patch notes. There’s also a LOT to manually go through between builds, so it’s likely that I’ll miss some things.

This will generally be a bit of a disorganized mess as it’s more or less a brain dump as I go, but I’ll try to keep things as neat as I can. Bear in mind as well that 99% of this document will be my own conjecture – I may (and likely will) be wrong about my interpretation of a lot of things.

Summary:

(As per \CitizenClient\Client_Release.id)

Wow! Each patch is getting more and more complex in the changes that are being made, which represents good, clear evidence of the progress the development team is making in turning the base hangar module content into an actual game. One immediately noteworthy thing is the insane jump in build numbers (from 44 to 5513) – although they already reset this count once way back on the October 22nd update, so this may be ultimately meaningless.

Unfortunately I was out of town for the release of this latest patch, which is why this post is so late. I’m going to only gloss over some of the bigger things that parties like AnythingFPS have already uncovered (such as the Freelancer variants) and focus instead on some of the other less obvious tidbits I’ve found.

Let’s get started!