Hi, i’m just curious about unity and how you can do things, so i’m wondering how you update your games, maybe you could decide you update your game a few months later and fix a few glitches or add new things.
Would you have to
Create a program yourself, maybe with visual basic and that updates your games whenever someone starts it?
Does unity have a special program that does it for you? (I’ve heard of something that you can buy that enables unity to update your game.
Oh and another thing is i think there is something called “Dynamic Downloading” and i’m just wondering if that would be possible with unity.
(Example) You run the game while it’s updating and the update could be changing some scripts of code or adding new ones.
Thanks for reading. (Have a nice christmas) :razz:
thats only in the editor, there is no update system built in Unity for builds.
the easy way would be to have the clients download the whole app again and install it.
Can’t you insert a patching thing into a client you’ve made that modifies the game and adds whatever needs updating, people wouldn’t like to download a game that’s 2Gb over and over again, unless the game can be played and updated at the same time.
Unity currently forces you to do the right thing and make sure you get as many bugs and glitches out of your game before releasing it. Far too many developers(AAA ones too) these days are relying on patches and release games before they are finished. So, unfortunately, no there is no update feature and you would have to write your own solution to patch/update your games code. But this is probably for the better, as it wont let you get lazy. Remember to always ensure you have enough time for debugging and fixing before release. A good developer will expect bugs to be found after release which they will have to patch, but a great developer will do enough debugging that they will be confident that no one will find bugs in their game.
I would like to have a way to update games as add-on content is becoming the norm and would be nice to add weapons and levels to a finished game(Halo’s map packs anyone?). I am sure its a feature that will be added, it will just take some time.
Currently this patcher only allows for users to connect to your server to see if there is a new version of the entire game. It is in the works to do a per file patcher. The patcher listed above currently does not update individual files.
Per file patcher is useless, cause it ends on the very same as whole application patching unless you use asset bundles.
Every file that is generated by build standalone will change completely enough on a rebuild to make even Binary Patchers fail doing any patching, forcing them to copy the original files!
I did something like this when I was using Torque in my old line of work. Basically I made a separate program coded in wxPython to check the checksums of each file in the game, download the latest checksum list, compare them, then make the program download the files that are either missing on the client, or has a different checksum value than the downloaded one.
It acts as a launcher that players run instead of the actual game exe file instead. It shows buttons to update the game, edit options, and finally a button to run the game, which merely runs the game exe file.
Since I do per-file downloading, care must be taken on how to package the game data. If you package all game data in one file, then it has to download that whole file all over again even if only part of the data was changed. Its best to package the game data to several small files, grouped logically, like all music go in one package, gui goes in another, etc.
Unfortunately, Unity does not offer you control on how to package your game data.
The ideal solution would be downloading the binary data delta and use a program like xdelta to apply a binary patch, but you’d need to account for all situations like a delta between version 1 to 10, 2 to 10, 3 to 10, and so on, so that no matter what old version your client is in, he can download only the necessary parts to become updated to the latest version.
The binary delta of a unity game build is the unity game build (independent on if you use xdelta or Indigorose Visual Patch), so you can just put up all files and let the patcher download all of them on a per file version base individually
What you are looking for is a launcher or patcher
In Windows Yes, did you look to the asset store?
I have done a list of assets for Updating Your Game
In windows is possible. Making experiment turns out is difficult for the player to configure it or difficult to create the installer. But still possible. Also, there are pay Windows installers that let you update your game.
