How do I patch my released game?

[Rozen Software]

Hi,

 

I'm just thinking about how would I patch my future released game? There are three cases, considering the standard edition:

 

1. Leadwerks engine patching - new dlls must be downloaded and replaced to new ones.

2. Scripts, game logic (C++) and the main exe file - this is little confusing to me. Do not know what to replace

3. New content: maps, models (assets) - most things are compressed and secured.

 

An entire new game version could be replaced of course but let's imagine that my game supports In-app content. How new maps, models and other assets could be downloaded to the client and patched correctly? How can I achieve that? Does LE support such things or if doesn't, will do in the near future?

 

Do you faced such problems?

 

Thank you,

regards,

Piotr

[dennis]

What about releasing on steam, I guess steam has code for tha.. built in the steam api

[arekkoz]

I doubt that steam api will be ever able to patch encrypted zip file.

Only complete re-download of the complete data is in option i think

[gamecreator]

I've thought about this a bit though I haven't implemented it yet.

 

First, you don't use Leadwerks's publish system since Leadwerks doesn't support this yet. You need to organize/zip files yourself to guarantee you have the system you need.

 

Next, I would have the latest files and maybe a file list uploaded to a website.

 

Finally, I would use a library like curl to compare local files to online files and download and update them accordingly.

[Rick]

I think using Steam to do this is the ideal situation since LE is so tightly coupled with Steam anyway. However that means changing the packaging system LE has now to account for this. Users are going to hate LE games as it stands if every small update requires possibly a gig or more update of the 1 data file.