Best practice for packaging and updates?

Development Platform & Builds
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I’m new at this. I’ve packaged my game and uploaded it to steam as an early access title. I am going to continue working on this game and releasing updates quite frequently. I noticed that when I packaged my game, I have a 8Gb pak file in my content directory. If I do a small update, such as changing a material or changing a boolean value in a blueprint, I don’t want to force my users to download 8Gb to get the updates. What’s the best way to package and distribute my game so that subsequent updates to the game are just the binary deltas instead of a full refresh?

I noticed that “Use Pak file” is enabled by default in the “project settings → packaging” section. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using pak files? Does my game run faster if I’m using a single pak file due to less disk I/O?

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Hi Slayemin,

For updating/patching/DLC for your game you will want to look into the information in our documentation here: Updating Unreal Engine Projects With Patches After Release | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

As for Pak files these put all your cooked assets into a single file that is recognized by the game when it loads. If you don’t use this it will package the project and give users access to all your source content as if it were a simple .uproject file that can then be opened in UE4 by them. For publicly released games this is not ideal and is better to use Pak files enabled.

I hope this helps.

Tim