Raising awareness of the importance to such topic on the Forums, getting votes, talking to moderators that are constantly reading the forum, etc.

My suspicion is that they are well aware of that kind of tools, and are as frustrated as us that they are not able to use them. But they could never convince their managers (the plague of the industry) to give them time to setup a good and reliable build environment.

I noticed on some updates that it apparently has been updated but the file names remained unchanged.

In this case i just deny the update because to much trouble to work with. I would have to manually create a new version because it is another build. As long as i do not critically need this update because of issues... i just leave it be and hopefully the next update is with a proper version ID.

A prominent example is Baldurs Gate 3: They was updating it but the update is named exactly the same. Because this game is very version sensitive... it is critical to become updated... else it may stop to work in any online environment.

In this case... not even sure the older build may even work... it may have to be manually changed.

Guess in this case i am gonna put the identical version into a V.2 folder, so it can be identified properly.

It makes even more sense, actually. Things we wouldn't know still.
Hope they can find a way anyway to reduce the workload with more scripting/automation/compression/etc.

A good sign that they're aware of the importance of community helping in areas that they currently lack somehow is their, apparently already confirmed, partnership with Heroic devs.
Another good sign is that they're aware and working on the problems that emerged from the 'Good Old Game' program it seems.

Inno Setup, DOSBox and SCUMMVM are Free Software. But I see nothing new in that field in 10 years.

I have been bitten by automation ideas many times.
https : //xkcd.com/1319/

But the real benefit of automation, in my view, is consistency, reliability and scalability. That is important in any business.

I wonder if this kind of troubles are also manifested on the game updates pipeline. So many developers complain about it...

Anyway, I may be delusional, but I see so many talented and industrious people on this forum that I believe that, if if GOG would embrace and direct them, things could really move forward. Pipe dreams would include:

- An official replacement for Galaxy, and several alternatives (e.g., for Linux). GOG could focus on their API, we would do the rest.

- Bittorrent + cryptography to create an alternative to that expensive CDN.

- Games running inside Virtual Machines (or Wine) to reduce those "it does not work for me" cases.

They first need to recognize there is a problem. Then they need to either try to address it or look for a solution outside.

I believe GOG devs are wizards! Getting old games to run requires a level of knowledge that few people can master. And they do that without the source code, sieving their solution between the game's requests and the modern OS' provides, none of the two budging. It is magic, I say!

Automation tools are something even the common man can use. What is outside their reach is convincing management that taking 2 weeks of work to automate things they already can do right now (poorly?) is worth any money. Color themes for Galaxy, on the other hand...

I would love if GOG would cooperate more with Heroic, Lutris, and other projects. But whoever calls the shots seems to have other priorities. And I hope they are right.

It is possible that GOG is not exploiting all the options that InnoSetup provide them. I would like to share with you why I think that may be happening (because you say you have little experience with compression).

You could look it up on-line (or you likely learned it from experience), the a trade-off between compression time and file size. The maximum compression level may take 3 or 4 times longer to complete (and maybe 3 or 4 times the RAM also), and in return gives you a compressed file that is 10% smaller, when compared with the default values.

If you consider that every update that is pushed to GOG or a new game comes along lead to many megabytes or gigabytes being re-processed, then it makes more sense that non-optimal values are used. When a games gets no update for a whole year, then maybe it could make use of an empty slot to get that extra compression, consolidate patches and so on.

Of course, computers are getting faster now, but games are also getting larger; I don't know how things are evolving. However, game size increases tend to be due to media files, and those are usually pre-compressed already. That means that the 10% gain may turn into 5% unless you really increase the dictionary size (RAM used) into crazy levels, and decompression (installation) will also be more demanding on memory and time.

By the way, there is a theoretical limit on how small a particular file can be. Compression only allows you to get closer and closer to this value.

All this was just to explain why it is possible that GOG's decision of not cranking up the compression level could have been a conscious decision.

Not quite anymore. We've hit a point where there's no smaller to go, new methodologies have to be developed. Computers will have to be made better, not faster. If only games could be forced to optimize code and trim the fat.

And now it seems they are pushing a slightly different version number.

setup_empire_earth_gold_2.0.0.2974_w11_rc2_(78078).exe
setup_empire_earth_gold_2.0.0.2974_w11_(78078).exe

That first update I downloaded on the 28th November, and here we are about a week later, and I got another update notification, only to find the slight name change upon downloading the latest update.

The newer file is almost 2 Mb larger.

The changelog has an entry for the 28th and lists a few things. What we don't know with this newest update, is whether it adds anything necessary or is just a bugfix because they screwed up something.

I have no idea about whether I should keep the version from a week ago. It would be nice to know what the issue was or what the differences are.

It is tough enough keeping up with updates and storage for them.

And we also have another update a week later for - Dragon Age™ - Origins - Ultimate Edition

It is hard not to be cynical sometimes ... though I believe they have been trying to fix some recent issues with that game at least, and version numbers are very different.

That is a very interesting topic. I don't think Moore's law is dead. I think it is changing. Sure, the lowest fruits have been picked, but I think there are still many opportunities to be exploited.

The current path, with multiple cores, is still underutilized by software. Transistors are sill shrinking and being stacked. New substracts may help with power efficiency.Photonics will be something cool!.

Sure, gains will be smaller, costs will be higher, but they will still come for quite some time. I hope.

As for games, better code is more expensive. Current frameworks allow developers to target multiple platforms with the same code. Saddly, I don't see things improving there. Only Moore can save us!