[2023] [Development] Optimization of the War Thunder file structure

Hello!

Today we would like to tell you about the transition to the new file structure in the War Thunder game client that the development team has already planned for in the upcoming major update.

In short: the new file structure will speed up the installation of updates on your computers and consoles, as well as reduce the size of download files!

The goal of the restructuring is to break up a number of heavy game files into smaller ones so that when these files are changed, players on consoles and the Steam client will download smaller volumes. On a PC, for those who update through our launcher, a partial file update system has been available for a long time, but this file structure change will speed up the installation of updates. In fact, players will receive War Thunder updates faster - we save bandwidth for users with slow or unstable Internet connections on Steam, PlayStation and XBox versions, as well as speed up the installation of updates for all players.

There should be no change in the game's load speed: on SSD, the speed will stay the same, on HDD there may be a slight increase or slowdown in the speed of installing files, depending on the history of use and receipt of updates (due to fragmentation of data on a disk).

The new file structure will be applied to the installation directory of the War Thunder client in the next major update. If you participate in dev-server testing (see post here), you will receive a new structure in the first session of testing the update. To switch to the new file structure, you will need to re-download about 15 GB of data (the exact data volume will be known closer to the release of the update), but only once. In following updates, the volume of traffic for consoles and the Steam client will be significantly reduced compared to the current file structure.

In one of the next major game updates, we also plan to restructure the texture data, the heaviest part of War Thunder files. Details about the second stage of the transition to the new file structure will be announced later.