Why the Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric patch is so huge
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric’s update is huge – as in 1GB huge. So what exactly is included in the massive patch? We did hear about a few things recently, but Sonic Stadium has offered further information as to why the update is so big.
Here’s what the site shared:
The cutscene where Lyric takes control of Metal Sonic has been updated with different lighting effects. Strangely enough this is the only updated cutscene.
The controller diagrams in the pause menu have been updated with some slightly different colouration; for instance, blue rings around the home menu.
Six levels have changes to them: Cliff’s Excavation Site, Bygone Island, Tomb of Lyric, Lyric’s Weapons Factory (past), Crater Lake, and the Ocean Purification Plant. FWIW, each level is stored in a single massive .stream file, which means any changes to the level necessitates including an entire new .stream file for that level in the patch data. The new .streams for these six levels adds up to over 1GB; that’s why the patch is so big. I don’t know specifically what they changed in those levels.
New executable file; this is where all the hardcoded bugfixes are.
Sonic Stadium goes on to say that making even one modification to a level means the update must include all data from that original file including changes since collisions/other data are stored in giant stream files. If the developers were to add one ring to a stage comprised of a 200MB file, the patch would be 200MB plus the data for that one ring. It’s a sign that Rise of Lyric may have been poorly programmed, and if there are any other updates in the future, they would probably be huge as well.
