Arcen Games

Other => Game Development => : Endless Rain June 25, 2017, 06:02:52 PM

: Can you add more old versions of your games to the Steam Betas system?
: Endless Rain June 25, 2017, 06:02:52 PM
I'm interested in trying out earlier versions of some of your games, especially AI War and AVWW1. Would it be possible for you to add major versions to the Steam Beta* system? Currently the only old versions using it are previous Starward Rogue updates and AI War 7.001, and I really want to see how some of your games evolved over time.

*Not to be confused with Steam Early Access, which is something completely different. For those unaware, Steam has a system for optional updates to games. Ironically, it is mainly used by developers who want to give players access to previous versions, especially when new updates can break save compatibility.


: Re: Can you add more old versions of your games to the Steam Betas system?
: Draco18s June 26, 2017, 12:35:14 AM
I do have a link for AI War 3.12ish

http://download.cnet.com/AI-War-Fleet-Command/3000-7483_4-10915432.html

It's from a little before the shift to Unity.
: Re: Can you add more old versions of your games to the Steam Betas system?
: x4000 June 26, 2017, 10:11:33 AM
I put in a few builds on Valley 2, though they don't go back that far.  And I put in some from AI War that go back to the first preview of 6.0.

The main problem is that in late 2012 Steam switched from an older data format to a new one, and the data format from the older "steam2" data format isn't available in the newer builds system.  Basically it was a process that upgraded from being less flexible and more manual to being something devs could completely control, and things from before that just weren't as well organized in general.

There wasn't anything useful on Valley 1 in terms of older versions because that work was mostly in 2011.  There are older builds for TLF and Bionic and so on, but the site started getting slow and I had some other things I needed to do, and you hadn't mentioned those as being of that much interest, so I didn't do them.

For AI War, there are indeed "demo" versions around the internet that are the full game, but require a license key to unlock.  For our older games in general, that was how we did them so that we could give away the demo files publicly and also offload some of our bandwidth costs.  That makes it so that if you go back into the older versions on steam it will ask for a license key you don't have, though, which kind of further compounds things.  I don't remember when we first stopped using the license key system: maybe Shattered Haven and then onward?