Handling Game Patches

[Gnatinator]

Hey guys,

Im curious to how all of you handle your game patching. Especially for those who do not use registration keys and only full downloads.

And in the case of just full downloads, couldnt someone just take the patched exe, replace the demo exe with it and get a full version? What do you do to prevent this?

Thanks.

[Reanimated]

I guess it depends on how your game has been made. If you have incorporated all the media into the EXE then someone could just download the patch and it would become the real thing. To overcome this, you could have a section on your site where only registered users can download it. Of course, this still means that someone could just leak the patch out, but anyone going to the trouble of searching probably wouldnt have been a potential customer.
If your full game is seperate from the demo then the patch idea wouldnt work because I'd assume your demo has a limited amount of media. This means that updating the EXE file wouldnt necessary let the user play the full version. You could have some sort of checks going to on to make sure that this is the registered verion. For example, in the full version, dummy files are randomly created in differnet folders and when you patch it, you search for these files. If the files exist ,you know that the game is registered. Just an idea :)

[KNau]

You can give Patchmaker a try. I haven't used it yet (planning to) but it claims to only store and write the differences between the old files and the new ones and therefore the patch by itself is useless. There's a free version you can test out:

http://www.clickteam.com/English/patch_maker.htm

[SamGamgee]

What I did with Hands to Quarters is:

- I didn't include all of the files from the full version in the demo (several graphics files were deleted and not used by the demo for example)
- All the file paths were changed in the demo version - so for example instead of Units/scout.hqb which is in the full version, the demo path would be 1/scout.hqb . That way if someone tried to install the patch on top of the demo, the full version .exe couldn't find anything.
- I don't include all the files in the patch (this is obvious I think).

Good luck,
Walter

[Kai Backman]

The ShortHike simulator uses online self-updating with all the benefits of delta encoding (only sending the changed parts over the line):
- The simulation uses license keys to unlock the full version
- Once unlocked the sim synchronizes to a subversion server for self-updating
- I run two development versions, only the stable one is available to non-members
- The basic full installer, and thus the demo, is updated when there are major changes to the stable version.

There are a few benefits both to the users and me:
- Updating for the user is a single button click and waiting a few minutes
- I can use all the power of Subversion to handle updating (tags, branches etc).

You can read more about the technique in this thread. :D

[Owen Thomas]

I've used Patch Maker myself. It's cheap and easy to use. The only downside is that it isn't very good at spotting which parts don't need to be updated in large files. In fact the patch for my game CrossCraze is larger than the full game itself.