[Chat is asking lots of questions about patching.] What's the status of delta patching?
TL;DRA delta patcher is being worked on in Frankfurt and Austin, already tested internally by developers, but no details or release timing are given because the approach may change.
There's some awesome stuff going on behind the scenes for delta patching. Of course, we don't have the most sophisticated patcher by any stretch of the imagination right now. It's just a huge amount of data that we've got to download and get out there. Again, I'm pretty sure this was all discussed long before I was even at CIG, because that patcher was in shape when a bunch of us arrived from Crytek. So I'm pretty sure the idea was, hey, let's just make sure we can get some stuff out to the community. Not really considering what the build size might be within two years, or maybe expecting that the patching would have changed.
So we are absolutely looking at this. This is happening in Frankfurt, with our DevOps guys in Austin as well. It's going to make a pretty big paradigm shift internally to us first, for developers. So to kind of pull that back, it's really important that we get you guys a delta patcher, but before that, if we change the way the patching works, we need that to work for us internally as well. Because if you think about it, we're sending those 40 to 60 gig builds all over the world for our developers. So first, it's got to work within the development mode. So we've already got a build online with it, which is really cool. So we've been testing it, finding out how it works from the developer standpoint. And it is a pretty fundamental change, because as Lumberyard is broken up into pack files, we have this idea of doing a little more uber of a pack file, and I don't really want to go into deep details on it yet, because a lot of the times I'll go into a detail and then we'll change it that next week.
And just as a quick side note, for those of you that are really interested in this topic, you should be able to find on our YouTube channel, maybe three months ago, a studio update with Mike Pickett in the Austin office, and he talks about a lot of cool information about the delta patching.
Yeah, and it's not that we didn't care about it or that it wasn't a big deal, but there was other things that were even higher priority to get worked out. Even things like just being able to kick up our servers. And you have to understand that DevOps is not a massive department, right? Within DevOps, are we talking like five or six people? Is it any bigger than that, Tyler?
They've got a handful more people, and I think they're hiring now.