An Auto Updater

[Togarma]

An auto updater like many other multiplayer games would be nice. Forgive me cause i dont know how much work it needs.

Edited March 27, 2019 by Togarma

[Stan`]

54 minutes ago, Togarma said:

An auto updater like many other multiplayer games would be nice. Forgive me cause i dont know how much work it needs.

The problem is providing one for all the platforms.

[Itms]

What do you mean Stan? Are you thinking about package managers?

To answer the top post, it would be doable but difficult. We could include a torrent client in the engine so that the game contents, especially the large assets, are updated efficiently. But self-upgrading the engine would be even more involved. Not even speaking about the security issues we would have to prevent.

I think the simpler way to do it would be to use a separate launcher for the game. That already exists (see Lutris for instance, on Linux) and, when the game is released, you will be able to use Steam or your preferred game launcher, since we will try to launch on as many platforms as possible. There is very little point in creating our own dedicated launcher.

[Stan`]

9 minutes ago, Itms said:

What do you mean Stan? Are you thinking about package managers?

Well one could have a download manager that re downloads the whole game, but the best thing would be patches files like what was done in old games, where you get a 15MB file instead of a 2GB one. Assuming one knows the install location it could replace the files in the correct folder. However we wouldn't be able to provide patches for all the linux distributions and their specificities.

[Itms]

2 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Well one could have a download manager that re downloads the whole game, but the best thing would be patches files like what was done in old games, where you get a 15MB file instead of a 2GB one. Assuming one knows the install location it could replace the files in the correct folder. However we wouldn't be able to provide patches for all the linux distributions and their specificities.

Ah I see what you mean. But the engine does not weigh 2GB, so it can be updated just by downloading the new version. The public mod, on the other hand, is identical on all platforms, and could be updated incrementally in theory. Splitting the public mod into smaller pieces (the art aside, typically) would help, because we could release small balance patches not touching the art, hence just modifying a small zip file, and launchers like Steam would be able to make users only download the changed file.