Harry, what happened [with the build taking more than an hour]? We had some big files in this build that we didn't have before, right?
TL;DRThe slow build may have been caused by a large added video file, but the team wasn't sure, and other unnoticed background issues, including Visual Studio toolchain bugs causing slow or hanging builds, turned out to be involved.
Well, one thing we were adding was the Aurora video, the commercial, which was a fairly sizable file. And even though the patch system does a diff and doesn't try to download the whole patch every time, still, that's a big add. So we weren't sure if that big of an add of a single file was what was causing this. So we were kind of trying to do some investigation, trying to figure out, is this what's slowing it down? Is that the one thing? We weren't sure, and it turns out there were other things going on in the background that we weren't aware of at the time that were biting us.
We basically have to work around bugs in the Microsoft Visual Studio toolchain that cause issues like just hanging builds, and they look like they're progressing, but they're just progressing slowly. You're not sure what's going on.