dimaveshkin
Member
You are right. It was also explained by one of the people in the know, I don't remember if it was Cherno or that engineer dude. I suppose they will be able to shrink patches even more by using diffs. Those are files which consist only the changes that need to be made to previous installs, on the binary level. Don't waste your time listening to people like Linus. They are useless "celebrities" who know shit.
Diffs aren't limited to text files. That's just how the command line tool in *nix systems works. You can diff textures if needed. Of course it needs to be done by devs but essentially any file can undergo such a process. I don't know if it's viable for all data. I've seen diffs for executables, for example.
That's cool to know that even binaries are patchable, but we still need to apply these patches. No way we gonna just store them on console alongside with original files.