Easiest way to update project.

[Crazycarpet]

So it's time for me to upgrade my projects to the latest Leadwerks 4.1 Beta, and as always I feel like it's going to be a headache, going through and replacing/editing the overwritten files. Does anyone have any tips/tricks that make this process any less of a headache? My projects getting to be quite large, and sometimes I forget to overwrite certain files. Would it be safe to just drag and drop my old code/script files over the new ones? I don't see a problem with this but maybe there is and I'm just missing it? don't know... anyways thanks in advance.

[Rick]

My tip is never modify the base LE files to start with so you don't have that problem. Always make your own scripts so they don't get overwritten, but yes in general copy and paste over should be fine, but generally those files is all that the update does (lua and shader files) unless Josh exposed anything new to the API or modified anything in the library itself, which I'm not sure if this update is only lua and shader updates or not. Would be nice of him to tell us.

[Crazycarpet]

unless Josh exposed anything new to the API or modified anything in the library itself, which I'm not sure if this update is only lua and shader updates or not. Would be nice of him to tell us.

 

Would actual be very nice to know, if you stumble upon this Josh let us know.

[gamecreator]

generally those files is all that the update does (lua and shader files)

Don't I wish. If you delete folders or files, Leadwerks replaces them, in addition to adding its own. I just updated a project to confirm that went from

304 files, 50 folders, 32.6MB

to

524 files, 60 folders, 171MB

[Crazycarpet]

Ouch, lol... maybe in the future it'd be nice to have a feature where you could de-select the updating of certain files or folders.. but at the same time that'd make it easy for people to break their game by excluding something that something else is dependent on from their project.

 

For now I just updated, and copy and dragged the files/folders, then re-deleted the things I didn't want.

[shadmar]

Try git locally, it wil track all changes to all files and show you the diff even, and you can just revert the LE update if not happy.

[Josh]

Typically, the only thing that gets updated are:

• engine executables
  
• shaders
  
• Sometimes scripts, as new functionality its added.
  

 

The last one is the trickiest because if you modify these scripts, there's not really any way of handling that. The only improvement I can think of would be to integrate SVN into the engine, and let that handle the merging, but you would still have conflicts that arise.

[reepblue]

Why not include (or convert the common into) a skeleton project that just has the needed files to get the engine to run? C++ user's are most likely going to ignore the scripts and if you edit the existing ones, it might get overwritten in an update.

 

You can make a template hierarchy system in the werk flie. This way you can have multiple templates installed in one project if you wanted too. Would allow much more flexibility for custom templates. Just allow the "Template" entry to read more than one value.

 

Then you can split the core engine components (shaders, executables) in one template folder, and make a new folder (Called SDK maybe) and place the scripts, and vegetation models in that template. to make the current 'blank' template, in the werk file do:

 

Template="Common|SDK"

 

For the FPS template, it'll look like:

 

Template="Common|SDK|Advanced First-Person Shooter"

 

And if you just want the core elements:

 

Template="Common"

 

Just my suggestion. Another way is to just customize the templates folder to your needs, but official updates will cause conflicts. So you'll have to disable updates until you're ready to hand update it again.

[Josh]

It's better to have an extra script file that never gets used than to have an angry user who doesn't understand why the tutorial he is reading doesn't work. A blank project template is already included.

 

I find it confusing that people are basically asking me to turn off all the functionality of a feature you opt into.

[reepblue]

Updating a game will probably never be painless. However, if we don't update our games, we get nagged by a dialog box to update our game until we do. That might mean a lot of work of reverting some script files, updating shaders, etc.

 

Personally, I'd be happy with a flag to disable the dialog box in the cfg.

[Crazycarpet]

Yeah, well thanks for all the suggetions. I think I'm going to take Shadmars suggetion of a local git repo to track changes. It'd at least tell me what things I deleted that were re-added and what not.

[Josh]

The next build will include a ignoreoutdatedproject setting. Set this to 0 in the config file to disable the dialog.

[reepblue]

Thanks.