Having dabbled in trying to make a quick delta patch system like Steam's, which required me to understand delta patching methods and made small patches to big files in a 10gb+ installation in a few seconds, this is sure is quite interesting!
I wonder if Steam ever decides to supercharge their content handling with some user-space filesystem stuff. With fast connections, there isn't really a reason they couldn't launch games in seconds, streaming data on-demand with smart pre-caching steering based on automatically trained access pattern data. And especially with finely tuned delta patching like this, online game pauses for patching could be almost entirely eliminated. Stop & go instead of a pit stop.
I wonder if Steam ever decides to supercharge their content handling with some user-space filesystem stuff. With fast connections, there isn't really a reason they couldn't launch games in seconds, streaming data on-demand with smart pre-caching steering based on automatically trained access pattern data. And especially with finely tuned delta patching like this, online game pauses for patching could be almost entirely eliminated. Stop & go instead of a pit stop.