How does the Arcen Updater work?

[HisDudeness]

Hi! Posted here as it's not related to any particular game.

The fact is I've got several Arcen games, all DRM-free (either from GOG or the Humble Store), and I've noticed they all ship with a copy of the updater, which in some cases can occupy as much space as the game itself (for example, 64-bits Skyward Collapse is 168 MB, while the updater amounts to 123 MB).

I'm curious if the updater is the same in all games, meaning I can keep just one spare copy and hardlink it in all the games to save space, or if every game needs its UDA folder it came with in its entirety.

[keith.lamothe]

Weird that UDA so large for your copy of Skyward Collapse; for my steam copy it's only 27MB.

Anyway, I don't suggest trying to hardlink it, as I don't think they're fully identical. If you're really curious you could use something like Beyond Compare to see if they're identical. Even then, though, we couldn't really offer support for what happens if the hardlink messes it up

[HisDudeness]

Thanks for the reply! So far, I've controlled Bionic Dues, Shattered Haven, Skyward Collapse and Tidalis. I still have to try AI War: Fleer Command, A Valley without Wind 1&2 and Starward Rogue, of the games I've bought. Excluding the logs, I've found UDA on BD and SH to be bit-to-bit identical, as well as the ones on SC and Tidalis.

The difference between the two, is the one in the games I've bought from the Humble Bundle (SC and Tidalis) seem to pack executable from all three platforms, while GOG (BD and SH) ships only the GNU/Linux updater with GNU/Linux games, which seems more logical. However, confronting the GOG updater with the folders GOG updater has in the HB updater (ArcenUpdater_Linux.x86*, ArcenUpdater_Linux_Data and UpdaterData), they are again bit-to-bit identical.

Also, that's the reason why my SC UDA was so big: included is, together with the GNU/Linux data folder, the general one, and the GNU/Linux binaries, 44.9 MiB of ArcenUpdater.app (OSX binaries and data), 10 MiB of ArcenUpdater.exe (Windows executable) and 15.6 MiB of ArcenUpdater_Data (Windows data). Removing those, together with the x86 binary I don't need, I amount to a total of 34 MiB (GNU/Linux binary is 7 MiB bigger than Windows' one).

As a final test, I ran a game I know needs some initial updates (GOG's Bionic Dues) replacing its UDA with the one found in HB's Tidalis (different game, different store). The updates completed successfully.

I feel quite confident keeping just one copy and hardlinking it in all my Arcen Games, with just a little caveat: the UpdaterData folder is probably better kept physically separated for each game, as that's the place where logs are created (ArcenDebugLog.txt and Unhandled Errors.txt) so, in case some error occurs and I need debugging, I need those files not being overwritten by another game.