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auto updating


DGMurdockIII
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Does it not as easy as you think.

0 ad is not an only MAC game, it's multiplataform and use many libraries and things that need to be attached or downloaded to compile the game.

Nowadays the most important thing is to continue the game development, increase the number of buildings, upgrades for more eras and general development.

Autoupdating is somenthing very secondary.

The priority should be develop a great first beta of 0 ad.

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They would have to write their own tool to make it work properly.

And as you know writing tools is a slow, tedious business, or 0ad would be 100% done by now.

(and probably everything else that's being made atm)

and given, they're busy on the game atm, deviating time to an auto updater would mean.. well.. the game would be delayed.

Maybe post 1.0

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We do hope to have an autoupdater out eventually, but as has been explained by others it's not a priority at the moment. Hopefully there will be time during the Beta phase to focus on things like this though, as all gameplay features should be done by that time and only bug fixes/performance improvements and other systems like translation should be done during the beta phase.

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There is actually some discussion going on in the Staff forums which might mean that we will move to Git sometime not too far into the future. I would say the question of an autoupdater and moving to Git are two different things though, at least in the sense of one program/tool/part of the engine that keeps the entire game updated. For everyone who uses SVN/Git already there's not much use for that + of course to have something that works on all OSs etc will take a lot of work.

It is possibly somewhat related though: The solution we're discussing at the moment is to move to Git, strip all .exes and .DLLs from the repository, and then make them available for separate download. To make that easy the plan is to create a simple .exe that could reside in the top 0 A.D. folder and then be run to compare the checksums of the local .exes and .DLLs to the ones on the server and if the ones on the server are newer, download them and put them in the correct places. It would still not be ideal as it would be two steps, but hopefully it will be easy enough to convince the artists that we should make the switch (provided we don't find any other issues with Git of course now that we're looking at moving more seriously). In any case, where it might be related (though don't take my word for it as I'm not a programmer) is that the .exe that would be used to make sure the .exes and .DLLs are updated could at least in concept, if not in actual code as it's so limited and only for Windows, be a precursor to an autoupdating function for the entire game. I'm not sure (again, not a programmer), but it seems like it could be a good way to test out some concepts which will later be useful for keeping the entire game updated. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

There is actually some discussion going on in the Staff forums which might mean that we will move to Git sometime not too far into the future. I would say the question of an autoupdater and moving to Git are two different things though, at least in the sense of one program/tool/part of the engine that keeps the entire game updated. For everyone who uses SVN/Git already there's not much use for that + of course to have something that works on all OSs etc will take a lot of work.

It is possibly somewhat related though: The solution we're discussing at the moment is to move to Git, strip all .exes and .DLLs from the repository, and then make them available for separate download. To make that easy the plan is to create a simple .exe that could reside in the top 0 A.D. folder and then be run to compare the checksums of the local .exes and .DLLs to the ones on the server and if the ones on the server are newer, download them and put them in the correct places. It would still not be ideal as it would be two steps, but hopefully it will be easy enough to convince the artists that we should make the switch (provided we don't find any other issues with Git of course now that we're looking at moving more seriously). In any case, where it might be related (though don't take my word for it as I'm not a programmer) is that the .exe that would be used to make sure the .exes and .DLLs are updated could at least in concept, if not in actual code as it's so limited and only for Windows, be a precursor to an autoupdating function for the entire game. I'm not sure (again, not a programmer), but it seems like it could be a good way to test out some concepts which will later be useful for keeping the entire game updated. :)

Any news on this? Perhaps the staff topic could be moved into the open forum, so as to enable other folks to help out with any tasks that need to be done?

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@zoot, just a little longer :P

Back on topic, auto update might be a great idea. It is certainly starting to become a standard. (Just imagine the awesomeness of a new autoupdating GUI among other things :))

I agree, and I can totally see a way to combine it with Gitification, so as to minimize duplicate work. Unless something else has already been planned.

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I don't like auto-updating software for practical, technical and security reasons. Unfortunately It has become a common bad practice on Windows which is probably because Windows doesn't offer any viable alternatives.

The security problem is that you have to trust a lot of different companies, organizations and people that they implement secure auto-updating. Remember that even Microsoft has had security issues with Windows Update, so It's not trivial.

It's also less user friendly compared to a central package management application because all these tools try to update at a different time and bother you with pop-ups, downloads, installation procedures etc...

I have no problem with optional auto-updating for development versions but I'd prefer to avoid it in a final release.

Maybe we could implement auto-downloading of mod content such as maps, new civs etc.. but we shouldn't auto-update the engine.

Engine updates should't be released too often to maintain compatibility.

I know that a lot of people don't care much about security issues and Windows-only users don't know anything better anyway... so there will most likely be some dispute. :ph34r:

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There are absolutely security issues, but I don't know if they pertain specifically to auto-updating or it is something common to any type of software distribution? Obtaining a sense of security by making it harder to update feels a bit like "security through obscurity"?

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There are absolutely security issues, but I don't know if they pertain specifically to auto-updating or it is something common to any type of software distribution? Obtaining a sense of security by making it harder to update feels a bit like "security through obscurity"?

Probably we need it for Windows to deliver securty updates, that's true.

What I mean is that we should still support the way how Linux distributions update their software. The auto updating component should be separated in a way that you can distribute the game without it. Also we shouldn't release non-security updates too often and make the game incompatible to users who don't like using auto-updaters.

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Probably we need it for Windows to deliver securty updates, that's true.

What I mean is that we should still support the way how Linux distributions update their software. The auto updating component should be separated in a way that you can distribute the game without it. Also we shouldn't release non-security updates too often and make the game incompatible to users who don't like using auto-updaters.

Agreed.

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Why don't just put in the game a check for the latest version (just check a file on wildfiregames.com containing latest release) and if > of installed version show a button with "New release available, check the 0 A.D. site!" that links to http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/LatestRelease (or even better one of the subpage depending on the OS)?

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