I’m seeing a lot of uninformed reactions to torrents…
That being said, i don’t think it’s going to work here. People will almost immediately ask: “I’m paying for this whole setup. Why is Microsoft using up my bandwidth to distribute it?” And if you make it an option, no one will use it so you won’t get the distributed network you were hoping for.
And yes, it is possible some users could try and send over malicious data. The packets will be rejected at the destination based on checksum, but they will clog the network. I don’t know how much of an issue this actually is.
You can use Delivery Optimization to reduce bandwidth consumption by sharing the work of downloading these packages among multiple devices in your deployment.
This is referring to updates being distributed within your own network, not to random users on the internet which would, of course, use up your own upstream bandwidth. It is essentially, local caching and copying.
Then why do my traffic look like this, when my PC is the only one on my network?
Funny thing: My upload went from about 700 MB to 1.2 GB while I had a little flight above Paris in MSFS just now. It could be a coincidence, or maybe MSFS already uses peer-to-peer networks?
I don’t care what it uses - what I do care about is that Steam has a fantastic background update client built in, but Asobo completely ignore it resulting in my Steam account being tied up while MSFS does its update (so I can’t use any other software), but also my “in-game” time increasing despite me being unable to play.
Totally ridiculous and I’m surprised it’s not against the Steam ToS to be honest.
I know you can download games in the background that you aren’t currently playing. By default that is off, but you can override it globally, or per game. But I don’t think you can download an update for a game you are currently playing, which I think you are implying. Apologies if that is not the case.
How would they, though? The .torrent file would be provided by Microsoft, and the vast majority of the file’s size is made up of checksums of the various chunks for verification purposes.
AFAIK the only way to send fake data in a torrent would be to create data that has the same checksum (i.e. a hash collision). So you’d have to generate data that matches the chunk size exactly (maybe 10-20 MB or so would be reasonable for an MSFS patch) AND matches the original checksum exactly.
There is a proof-of-concept attack like this (BitErrant), but only when the attacker actually creates the torrent file, so the attacker would have to work for MS/Asobo.
In addition, MS could easy verify the checksums of the downloaded files separately (using another algorithm) making it practically impossible for a BitTorrent swarm member to forge data.
The idea isn’t outlandish. In fact, Blizzard’s launcher actually uses Bittorrent technology, which was pretty obvious in early versions of Battle.net. It’s not as insecure as people make it out to be - a lot of effort has gone into ensuring file downloads are legitimate and not tampered with. It would definitely be a major step up from their current system, and enable features like resumable downloads and multiple connections to maximize reliability and speed, and being P2P would also mean less strain on the servers.
That said - even using the native Windows Store / Steam installers would be a step up from their custom install manager. Both Windows Store and Steam support custom content and integration, and Microsoft has plenty of other games on Steam so I don’t think it’s a huge problem to use both platforms.
Ultimately, the decision for a custom from-the-ground-up installation and content management system baffles me, especially since they’re not putting much effort into it. If you’re going to make something custom - put effort into it and make it a priority to fix when things go wrong. That’s the whole reason why you do custom at all.
Umm, no, it wouldn’t, not for MS Store users. That would mean that all content downloaded with the Windows Store installer would be in a protected folder, like the current launcher is.
I suggested that via a zendesk ticket many moons ago. They simply don’t care about the user experience. Its all about control. Efficiency doesn’t matter.
