Software updater for Ren'Py games?

[wizzardx]

I'm not sure if other people have this problem:

Sometimes a VN is a work in progress, but you're still releasing it to testers. Or perhaps it's chapter-based, and you release new content periodically. Or perhaps the game is being co-developed, and you want to share updates.

Either way, you need to get updates to your testers/players/etc in some way.

Often it's good enough to just upload a new zip file, and then get people to re-download it.

But what if your zip file is pretty large, and you've only changed a few small files?

Typically in a case like this, you might use a revision control tool (git/subversion/etc). But those are a bit technical for non-programmers, or for end-users.

What I often do is include a file sync tool in my projects (rsync), and a batch file to run that, to grab just updated files from my internet server. But that's only practical if you have an internet server - most people would need to upload to megaupload or rapidshare or something.

What I'm getting at: What would be nice, is if Ren'Py had a built-in way of letting users update their games to newer versions.

I remember PyTom mentioning something before about letting people host their VN code on his server, to avoid people losing projects (don't remember when or where that was).

What might be interesting, is if there was an easy-to-use Ren'Py game updater, possibly tying into that service (or other internet hosting options. eg: bittorrent?), so that players could, when launching the game, see that a new version is available, and then download it from within the game itself.

Though, I'm not sure how much demand there is for that kind of feature. Certainly, I find it quite useful for my own projects.

[Aleema]

There is, actually, several versions around the forums and on the wiki, and PyTom has even said that he plans to make it an official functionality. Not to mention if you learn Python you can just code it yourself, which is what several people have already done. So there you go. =P

[wizzardx]

Interesting, thanks for that information

[jack_norton]

Yes that was a feature I requested many times. I coded one myself but there are lots of things to consider (security, windows access control, permissions, etc) so that I prefer to let expert coders do it

[OdysseyStudio]

Yeah, this tool will come in handy. Plus with the cloud services out there, like ubuntu one, dropbox, ect., I could link the updater to the zip file on my ubuntu one account, and bam!, everyone has access to that update.