Possible to update DCS with the update files in hand instead of remotely?

Hi guys,

a friend of mine plays DCS but struggle keeping it updated. He lives in a forested area with limited and expensive dish/satellite internet connection.

So you will understand that those few gigs updates are not easy for him to deal with. So I was wondering ...

Is there a way I could personally catch those update files for him (I have a monstrous unlimited gigabit internet connection), put them on a USB key, then he would update from this USB key while using DCS_Updater.EXE?

I looked around and did not find anything, but I may miss something.

Thanks guys!

If you both have the same version of DCS (Openbeta or Stable), you could just copy the whole \Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS folder, as the registration for his modules are on his Windows' Registry and wouldnt be affected by a copy.

You would need a large USB 3.0 Pendrive :)

Edit: Thinking again, it wouldnt work if you have different DLCs installed :(

If they don't release an offline patch, it's harder, but not impossible, it may take doing some stuff manually, but each update it's a task so an automated program diff/patch function should do it much faster.

You would need to do this every time for each new patch, ofcourse.

Also you can't just take the root folder as there's some user specific stuff in there which you would have to take out first.

Copying the whole thing also requires a lot more space and thus more time, but it's doable right now most likely. But if you would do this every 2 weeks for each patch, 160-200 GB of transferring each time would become annoying.

Now if you're only dealing with one other PC that you have access to it shouldn't be that hard to do a diff/patch system, but it's not that straight forward, need to process a ton of files, would need some interface or scripting for the diff/path utilities out there, bsdiff and jdiff, I'll look at how they operate later.

Manually editing those update/metadata/version files might be a chore if user-specific stuff is mixed in it.