I’m lucky enough to not have suffered from the downloading issues that have plagued users since day 1 of the launch and haven’t been adressed by Asobo.
But it is worthy to note that there is an official TODO list of workarounds before a fix is sent:
https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016844080-Download-stuck-on-packages-Install-loop
Given the nature of the workarounds to the problem, it is quite obvious that the installer is hopelessly broken and that not a tremendous amount of thought and software engineering has been put in it.
It is also quite incredible that this is not considered a top priority, at the same level as CTDs.
There are reports of installations entirely corrupted by the failed installation of a patch. I think it’s easy to understand why, just by looking at what the installer does:
it installs part of a patch right after having downloaded it. If something wrong happens after that, like the user interrupting the download because the downloader is stuck in a loop, the entire installation is now corrupted !
However, all it has to do to avoid that is to download all the files in a zip format that is cut in equal parts (for instance in parts of 50Mb or 100Mb each, like what was done when games were distributed on floppy disks), check the CRC of each one of them, and when everything has been downloaded correctly without CRC error, ONLY THEN you unzip and install the files. That is btw how most correctly written downloaders work. This has the benefit that if the download is interrupted, it can be restarted where it was stopped last time. The drawback i it momentarily requires to store the compressed data on disk but that’s something most players of such a big game usually have.
Also the variable containing the version number should be the LAST thing updated, when the entire installation process has been successful. If that’s not the case, then the game considers it’s up to date, while in fact it’s entirely broken, and the player will experience weird behaviour or crashes right from the start depending on what was installed and what wasn’t. And the sole solution will be to delete and install everything again.
As to why the installer can choke and be stuck in a loop: one reason seems to be due to the “window autotune” of Windows 10 and Vista which adjust receive buffer sizes of sockets. Some older routers and in particular wi-fi routers are incompatible with this feature, and the looping may happen at that level, not at the downloader level. The installer should be able to monitor and detect that situation, automatically disable the “window autotune” feature for the duration of the download, and re-enable it again at the end of the download process. But in fact, if the zip is cut in 50 Mb chunks, the choking problem may actually never appear.
