Post by Amos in itch-io client download goes.. where? And it leaves it on disk, wasting disk space

Viewing post in itch-io client download goes.. where? And it leaves it on disk, wasting disk space

Hey Frederic!

I understand the frustration & have been working on it ever since Aven Colony was released on itch.io

Trying to handle one thing at a time:

It downloads to the wrong directory / extracts into the wrong directory

this sounds like the Install Location you added wasn't the default when you installed Aven Colony. I just started downloading a big game (using itch 18.10.1) and, as designed, it downloads to the right directory:

(It also extracts in the same disk, as `Quote-stage` folder, then merges with `Quote`)

What I think happened is: you had Aven Colony installed (in the default install location, which is `%APPDATA%/apps`), then changed the default install location because an update was downloading and it filled your SSD. This doesn't change the install location of Aven Colony, you can check by using the "Show local files" button in the right sidebar when the game is opened.

WHY doesn't it clean up after itself when it is done ?

The historical reason for this is to allow re-installing without re-downloading. The app deletes the download when you uninstall the game instead.

For small games (<300MB), which was the main use case for the itch app originally, it sounds reasonable. For large games like Aven Colony, it's a disaster - it gets especially bad in a scenario where:

The initial download is kept around (4.6GB)
A few patches are downloaded, they apply cleanly (a few hundred MB)
A patch fails to apply, so the full latest version is redownloaded (4.6GB again)

This has happened to a few people, and it's bad! Keep reading to know the solution I'm working on.

And why does it not resume partially downloaded files, but instead redownload everything from scratch ?

I promise it does resume - again, what I think happened is a "patch failing to apply cleanly" scenario as described above. If you want to convince yourself it does resume, just pause downloads and start them over again (if it doesn't resume, it's a bug, and I'll be wanting to look at some log files).

Here's what I'm working on: instead of storing the .zip file in a downloads folder, I found a way to extract it while it's downloading. This means:

No downloads folder needed anymore
No staging folder for extraction (copying 10GB around takes time!) - the game is installed faster

It supports resumes, just like regular downloads.

For games not in .zip format, the old "download, then extract" behavior will still be there (since the app has to use another extractor then), although it won't keep the archive around in downloads once it's done.

Keeping patches after they've been applied is a bug - in the new version, they're simply applied while they're being downloaded, so, not even written to disk - problem solved.

Patches that fail to apply (because it needs files that have been modified since to reconstruct new files) will no longer trigger a full re-download, but instead, only re-download the files in particular that couldn't be reconstructed.

As for download speed limits, I'm working on it in the same iteration so, Galaxy will be on its lonesome soon!

These are big changes, that's why they took a whlie. It's not quite ready yet, but I'll be releasing beta versions of the app on our canary channel (which we use for QA).

Thanks for raising these issues and giving me a chance to post a definitive answer in the meantime!

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