First, lets say I have a text based game (for simplicity). I released the game, and the people extract the .exe to a location. When I play through it I find a few grammar errors or maybe I want to add something. How could I go about updating the code without the user redownloading the game again? Keep in the mind, the user will have the game already installed, I just want to know how I can 'change' that installed game without the user redownloading an updated version. Thanks!
This is mostly done through diff and merge tools. You may want to check google on something like "how to make patches" and "diff merge tools"
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Ok! I got a program called WinMerge, I think this is what I want. Here is the site here I still don't understand how this will 'patch' a user's game if they install it.
You need something more sophisticated than that. WinMerge only works with txt files, if I recall correctly. Regardless the software itself has to involve binary comparison, versioning and merging.
Visual Patch is one of these. There may be others...
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Maybe I'll just hold out on this then! I'm making it more complex than it seems, and I'm not about to go buy a $500 program just so I can make different versions, thats just dumb. I'll just stick to keeping it simple...Thanks anyway though! $500 for managing versions? Wow people make money off the dumbest things....
EDIT* It's $900...Jesus...
Well patching an exe is not that simple. You are essentially inserting assembly opcodes into the original stream and thus are also changing the offsets of other items in the code.
The best way I can see to patch a modern app is to use DLLs. Write your code in such a way as to only have the core of the code in the exe. It would gain all other functionality from the DLL. So you would simply provide a new DLL to the end user and they would gain the new functionality.
Making a spiffy, professional looking executable is not a cheap task. Things like the patching program you're speaking of and installers like InstallShield can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. If you're doing a small app, you'll have to do without some of the nice features major commercial applications offer. Designing your code like Bubba said, is probably the easiest free way of making updates to your game. Replacing or adding a single DLL can be much easier than reinstalling the entire application.Originally Posted by Sentral
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