How Larian Studios Speeds Game Development by Moving Data 5x Faster Between Locations

Best known for its work on the critically acclaimed Divinity role-playing game (RPG) series, Larian Studios is an award-winning video game developer headquartered in Ghent, Belgium. Thanks in large part to the ongoing success of its Divinity titles, the studio has expanded in recent years, adding satellite offices in Dublin, Ireland; Quebec, Canada; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All four locations are connected via a tightly encrypted VPN and share game data and other files over 1 Gbps+ WAN connections.

As part of the studio's core development workflow, nightly builds and software assets have to stay in sync. With multiple studios pushing and pulling files daily, version control across locations is critical. Maintaining a high transfer rate for terabytes of data over long distances is also a top priority. In 2019, Larian adopted Resilio Connect (now Resilio Active Everywhere) after testing several competing solutions.

For the people who keep that pipeline running, like Lead Tools Programmer Sebastiaan Sprengers and Producer Octaaf Fieremans, the measure of success is simple: every studio and every partner starts the day with the latest build, no matter how far apart they sit.

The Challenge

Outgrowing Built-In Sync Tools

Before moving to Resilio, Larian had been using the built-in file synchronization functionality provided by its existing storage solutions. Within Europe, that worked well enough, but performance broke down over distance, especially for the large files at the heart of game development.

"We were using the basic tools offered by our NAS and our servers to sync data. That basically meant rsync and other default options that you'll find in Linux," says Lead Tools Programmer Sebastiaan Sprengers. "And we found that speed wasn't that great. In Europe, it was fine, but once we started syncing to our offices in Quebec or Saint Petersburg, we saw that it wasn't ideal for big files. We just had issues with connection drops, high latency, and packet loss."

This need for an alternative to rsync and other legacy tools highlighted a clear goal for faster, more robust data synchronization. But Larian didn't want to change or add to the storage infrastructure it already had in place. Any new solution would therefore need to offer more than superior performance. It would also have to integrate smoothly and affordably with QNAP and Synology enterprise NAS devices, as well as Larian's Linux-based servers.

Keeping Pace in a Dynamic Industry

Larian hasn't just expanded to new international locations. Its third-party partner network has grown, too. For more recent titles like Baldur's Gate 3, the studio has worked with UK-based voiceover artists and motion-capture experts in addition to augmenting its in-house QA teams.

That increased the daily amount of data transferred both internally and externally. It also added to the number of users contributing to and drawing from shared file pools across what had become a distributed file system spanning four continents. On top of that, the international collaboration led to tighter turnaround times, with new audio files and game builds needing to be processed and tested as soon as they were ready. Data consistency across all locations became a requirement to meet platform submission deadlines.

"Our QA teams are spread out worldwide, and if they can't get the new version with the latest changes, sometimes we would lose a full day of QA," says Producer Octaaf Fieremans. "And when you're working against deadlines or submissions for platforms like PlayStation or Xbox One, that can really hurt you."

The Solution

A Perfect Fit for the Existing Stack

After testing several options, Larian chose Resilio for the combination of performance, price, and ease of deployment onto the hardware it already ran. The data migration from legacy sync methods was straightforward because Resilio agents install directly on existing NAS and Linux infrastructure with no new servers required.

"Once we looked at the functionality and the price and how it was set up, Resilio came out as the best choice," says Sprengers. "It was easy to set up with our in-place hardware. We could install it on our current NAS and servers, and basically just plug into what we already have."

Full-Throughput Nightly Builds

Along with ease of migration, Resilio brought substantial gains in download speed and throughput. Sprengers estimates that it was "four to five times faster" than the previous methods in transferring data to Quebec and other distant locations. That, in turn, accelerated the entire development process.

"The nightly builds that we pump out involve a large amount of data. Getting that synced to every QA team in each studio proved to be quite difficult with the software that we had. With Resilio, as soon as our build servers have a build ready, it uses the entire throughput of our gigabit lines to distribute it to the other studios. So QA can start in the morning on a fresh build."Octaaf Fieremans, Producer at Larian Studios

Scaling to New Studios and Outside Partners

That speed and resiliency also smoothed Larian's path to expansion. When it opened its Kuala Lumpur office, Resilio immediately overcame the routing and ISP issues that had been detrimental to other network activity.

Resilio has also become the linchpin in the studio's workflow with its outsourcing partners.

"We've set up Resilio on our FTP server, so we can have externals get data from us or put data on there. We then use Resilio to sync that to a local file server in one of our offices. People can easily access the data locally instead of downloading from the FTP server. Which is a big plus."Octaaf Fieremans, Producer at Larian Studios

The Results

Speed and Reliability Without a Forklift Upgrade

Without Resilio, Larian faced two unappealing options. The studio could continue using slow, unreliable generic sync solutions, or it could install a new, expensive data management solution that requires additional infrastructure. Resilio avoided both.

"Other solutions had too many features that we didn't need, or required new servers. We weren't looking into completely changing our infrastructure or setting up servers everywhere all over the world," says Sprengers.

Cost-Effective Agility at Scale

By reusing its in-place architecture, Larian got the performance it needed without the cost and disruption of new hardware.

"For us, the main thing was fast transfer of data and obviously maintaining the integrity of all the data that we sync to our offices. And definitely the cost is very important. We were happy to find a solution where we could use our in-place architecture to keep down the cost."Sebastiaan Sprengers, Lead Tools Programmer at Larian Studios

Resilio has given Larian a cost-effective way to synchronize vast amounts of data between its offices and external partners at speeds approaching the maximum available bandwidth. By preserving data quality and file integrity at every endpoint, Resilio has helped optimize the studio's most critical workflows, enabling the game studio to be more agile overall and to continue its long-standing record of success in developing Triple-A titles.

Move Faster

Larian Studios runs on Resilio

For Larian, game development doesn't wait for files to copy. By distributing nightly builds and game assets across studios and partners at near line-rate speed, Resilio keeps every team working from the latest data, wherever they sit on the map, all on the infrastructure Larian already owns.

Ready to move faster? Schedule a demo to see how Resilio can accelerate your game development pipeline.