"Update" feature on game menu

[C27]

I'd like to suggest/request a version update feature on the game menu which will check to see if the game files are up to date, and then give you an option to update them to the latest release version or latest beta version. Selecting one would, naturally, download the new game files and update Warzone for you, then restart the game.

What do you think about this?

[Lord Apocalypse]

Doable on windows, maybe mac.. but not so sure about linux. Would be a nice feature though if it would work out correctly.

First it would have to know which OS to look for an update (in the rare circumstance that win/mac/lin actually had a separate release). Next it would have to download the correct update or install package. Finally, install the new update. Some OS restrictions may keep this from happening. This is more of what level permissions the user account has such as admin or guest in windows.

[C27]

As a relatively new Linux Mint user fresh from Win7, I'm quite aware of how obtuse and aggravating uncompiled source downloads are. It might be okay for the other OSes though, at least for people that like to always have the freshest beta.

I guess it's probably more work than it's worth, considering the other things that could be done instead that would actually add in-game features. I'd rather have those.

[Iluvalar]

If you are a linux player, take a look to the "git" command and instruction here and there. That's what the developers use to edit the game.

This is not very clear but that's what we have now : http://developer.wz2100.net/wiki/GitHowto

[Giani]

Or maybe just a button that instead of updating the version of wz, when you click it,it checks if you have the latest stable version. If you don't it could take you to http://developer.wz2100.net/wiki/Download ?

[C27]

Well, that would certainly be easier to implement. :p

[Tenoh]

I vote for auto updater ^_^,saves me making new foders for new versions!

[Emdek]

Manual or automatic (but maybe with some additional conditions and ability to disable it) could be useful, but it probably should only give instructions how to update or point to downloads page. In future someone could for example take a look into code of Mozilla Firefox which AFAIR has autoupdater feature and has freely available source code to study how it works.

Lord Apocalypse, compile time checking for generic defines determining OS should be enough, enable one path on WIndows, another on Mac and for Linux simply suggest to use package manager and show link to page with instructions how to compile from sources (marked as advanced), such information could be displayed for all platforms.

But we would probably need (more) flexible GUI system first anyway.

[Lord Apocalypse]

No, I think the gui is fine, just add a new option on the main menu or a sub menu just like how skirmish games were moved from the multiplayer sub over to the campaign(?) sub. Just add a new option and the code needed for it.

Thing is, I haven't seen many autoupdates inside the game menu. Most autoupdates I see are called from a game launch app. EVE, WoW, Neverwinter Nights, and a few others I can't recall have an external app that you use to launch the game. Civilization 4 though is the only one I can recall off the top of my head that has an update option in the game itself.

May be easier to decide if there should be a launcher app that can handle updates, starting the game, etc rather than adding it into the game directly. Gtk, Qt, wxWidgets... any of those should be able to do it all on supported platforms.

[Emdek]

Lord Apocalypse, no, WZ GUI API is really horrible.
It's a real pain to make bigger changes (even simple widening of menus took a lot of time to figure out which constants need to be changed etc.), it is very easy to introduce bugs if we forgot to change some code (like quite recently, after rearranging some options after changes to unit color selectors).

Launcher application for sure has advantages but the main issue for me is that such window will look very different from game itself and would require to always have additional step (even if invisible to user). Instead probably game itself should detect availability and ask if update (if someone would implement such thing) and then close and run such helper application which will download and initialize installer.

And in such case (helper only) if could be using some Windows only APIs (but probably not .NET ones).

[Lord Apocalypse]

Easiest solution would be to use the Qt networking functions to check for an update silently. The issue then is how to alert the user that a new update is ready or if it should be downloaded in the background. Easy enough on windows but could it be done on linux with out needing higher level permissions?

[Emdek]

Alert could be shown in main menu, as text (maybe flashing, for few cycles), under that one with link to the site.
At beginning it could for example only be a link to release notes and later could invoke that helper application.

And yes, we could ask user for privileges escalation and installation path, although as I've said above, we should suggest to first try packages manager and always have at least generic (well, compiled on latest Ubuntu) DEB packages and generic RPM packages (CMake can generate them for us using CPack, I need to finally start working on that again ).

[NoQ]

Easy enough on windows but could it be done on linux with out needing higher level permissions?

It requires the same level of permissions on linux and windows. But windows users have a horrible habit of always having these permissions available on their default user account, which is one of the obvious reasons why malware can install and update itself so easily.

The main problem of autoupdate on linux is not system but culture. The updates are done via repositories, as much automated as the user wants. It is as if you got Warzone 2100 updates from your "windows update" system rather than from the wz2100.net website. Thus, auto-update is not necessary for linux as long as repositories are up to date (which is wrong on most distributions) and impossible to implement on the game side (too much distribution-specific).

Note that even apps like Firefox or Skype have no auto-update feature for linux.

Spoiler:

Also, i hate auto-update in all forms and i think this feature should be banned forever in all countries of the world!
Users should always know what their computer is doing, what applications it is installing, etc.
(:

[Emdek]

NoQ, sure, I'm also against auto update, but checking if installed version is current is important (of course with ability to disable it, as I've stated earlier, setting flag in configuration file should be enough), especially for MP.

And I don't know how it currently works under Windows (but probably didn't changed to worse) we will only need ask user if we can't write to selected path (the same for Linux), not everyone will install to default system directory.

And for Linux, in case of Ubuntu (which is most popular flavor) updating via official repositories is not an option as they are stuck with 2.3.8 for long time... It would be best to offer own packages or let build system to generate one (so, move to CMake finally) as such package could be managed by package manager correctly and it will resolve conflicts and dependencies for us.

[NoQ]

For ubuntu, maintaining a PPA is the obvious choice for auto-update.
An overlay for gentoo.
An AUR PKGBUILD for archlinux (already exists).