When patching fails, repair | EVE Online

When patching fails, repair

2010-07-13 - CCP Mandrake

Having undergone several updates since its initial release, the new and much improved repair tool has been released, leaving me with no reservations as I give myself a high five.

When EVE Online is installed you will notice that along with the Play EVE shortcut it creates in the start menu, it also creates a Repair shortcut. Running Repair will start the repair tool, verifying that your EVE Online install is correct and fixing any corrupt or out-of-date files it finds in your EVE Online install directory. However, if you installed EVE a long time ago, you might not have that Repair shortcut in the start menu. In that case,  you can browse to the directory EVE Online was installed to and execute repair.exe to start the repair tool.

The repair tool is mainly thought of as a backup if patching fails, as patch days can be very hectic where tens of thousands of players hit our file servers all at the same time. For a small percentage of our player base, patching the game client in some cases simply fails under these conditions. Now, if a patch fails midway, instead of having to download the entire game and reinstall, the repair tool can fix the problem faster and more efficiently. It will pick up where the patcher left off and close the deal, updating EVE Online to the latest and greatest.

The new version of the repair tool was completely rewritten from the ground up and is largely based on a very clever technology called Zsync. This bit of tech allows the repair tool to look at a corrupt or out-of-date file and, using magic that any self-respecting medieval inquisitor would consider utter herecy, calculates what data is correct and what is missing from the broken file. It then downloads only that missing data and voila! The file is fixed, combining the correct data already present with the missing data that was just downloaded. This is a considerable step up from the older version of the repair tool which would only download whole files no matter how tiny the changes actually required are.

Currently the repair tool only works on Windows, but development on a new and improved version of the repair tool that will also work on Mac machines has already started (another high five). It will be more efficient so that less data needs to be downloaded and might also have additional options like clearing the cache or updating bulk data files. If you have your own ideas of what might be useful to have in the repair tool, post a reply in the comments section and tell us all about it!

Over to you - CCP Mandrake