Suggestion : AGS Patch creation.

[Ferret]

I've noticed that one or two people here are planning to move into the commercial sector of adventure games, and also that some of the newer projects are getting larger (in file size) and could be quite a hassle to have to re-upload it every time there was bug fix.

Although uploading games isn't really a problem, a bug in a commercial game would not currently be rectifiable and in the end you could either ignore the bug, hope that you can play around it without it affecting the game or the developer re-releases another copy of the game, making the end user have to pay a second time to fix the problem.

Anyhow, rant aside...

A patch function in AGS would help to fix future issues like this. The idea would be to have AGS take note of everything that's been changed since the file was last opened and when it gets saved, along with creating a standalone EXE, it also makes a Patch.EXE which contains only the items that have been modified (scripts, levels, sprites, etc...) since last edit.

This patch could then be run and it would add it's new data to the existing standalone EXE, overwriting the old data, fixing the problem, adding possible new things, finding lost car keys and all the developer would need to do is upload the patch instead of re-uploading the entire game or explaining to the people who bought your game that there's a major fuck-up and could everyone stay out of Room #332.

Chances are this is gonna be a pain to implement, but hey, I might as well throw some idea's your way while I'm here.

[Pumaman]

This idea came up before with KQ1VGA, where they wanted the ability to have a patch rather than uploading a whole new version.

It is viable, but it's not something I've had time to do yet. It's on my list, but low priority due to the small number of games that are large enough to require it.

[Gilbert]

Well if it's just a change of saparate resources, like a music/sound file or even a room file, just throw the new files in the games' directory and the engine would use the new files instead of the ones present inside the packed game files (Actually that's similar to how Sierra handled patches for SCI games). But of course if you change a room, it may render old savegames useless (or strange things can happen) and require you to replay the game from the beginning.

But if you change other things, such as the sprite set, the global script, and some of the other settings, nope, you can use this "patch" function at the moment.

[Pumaman]

There's also the issue that if you distribute a patched room, other people can open it in the AGS Editor, which is perhaps not desirable. A patch would be compiled into a single data file to avoid this problem.

[ThunderStorm]

What about Clickteam's Patch Maker?
Or wouldn't it work with AGS games for some reason?

[Pumaman]

It should work - depends on what has changed as to whether the patch it generates is size-efficient or not, but it's worth a try if you need to patch something, definately.

[Scorpiorus]

What about Clickteam's Patch Maker?
Or wouldn't it work with AGS games for some reason?

I think it can do the job until the build-in patcher  is implemented.

[Paper Carnival]

I tried it with another patcher (I don't remember which one was it) and I added a gui and some code and in the end I just saved 70kb (from the 900kb file), even though the patcher was pretty good