Arcen Games

General Category => Skyward Collapse => : Ravinius June 13, 2013, 06:58:32 AM

: Update 2.0 distribution?
: Ravinius June 13, 2013, 06:58:32 AM
Hi to all. New to this forum. I just bought Skyward Collapse and I'm wondering about one thing. When previous games would receive major update players would just download the demo and use their serial number to unlock full game in new version (in example AI War from 5.0 to 6.0). Now Skyward Collapse works differently as noted on its main page. Players receive secure download via their mail when they buy the game. So how will the distribution of major updates (like for example 2.0) look like? Will every buyer receive email with new file or will it work through updater? Also about availabilty of said secured file. In the mail I received it's mentioned that the link with game will only work for few days. While it's mentioned that after it goes inactive I just have to send a return mail I wonder how effectively it works.
: Re: Update 2.0 distribution?
: x4000 June 13, 2013, 07:48:08 AM
Welcome to the forum!

In terms of updating the installer, we will for new customers, but I have no idea I'd we'll be able to resend to all existing customers. I've not seen a way to do that yet. The in game updater will easily update you, however!

In terms of the download, ideally you only need to do that once. If you send a reply message asking for a re-download, someone manually responds to that on our end. It's presumed that unless your hard drive crashes or something (which we understand happens), that generally people hang on to files they want to keep. ;)

One tip: the game uses nothing in the registry or any folders beyond what you installed it into. So if you want a "re-installable" backup of whatever particular version of the game, then just update to that version and then zip up the folder it was installed to. You can run the game from that folder elsewhere on your computer, on a new computer, on a flash drive, whatever. That makes it very easy to archive!

Hope that helps. :)
: Re: Update 2.0 distribution?
: doctorfrog June 13, 2013, 04:10:37 PM
One tip: the game uses nothing in the registry or any folders beyond what you installed it into. So if you want a "re-installable" backup of whatever particular version of the game, then just update to that version and then zip up the folder it was installed to. You can run the game from that folder elsewhere on your computer, on a new computer, on a flash drive, whatever. That makes it very easy to archive!

This is a great concession that Arcen does with its games. I sync AI War and Valley 1 between my home PC and a flash drive. Works great!
: Re: Update 2.0 distribution?
: keith.lamothe June 13, 2013, 06:49:23 PM
Yea, generally speaking I think the games would run from the flash drive, just plug it in any machine and run the .exe .

But I'm not 100% sure what performance would be like :)
: Re: Update 2.0 distribution?
: x4000 June 14, 2013, 09:36:26 AM
Yea, generally speaking I think the games would run from the flash drive, just plug it in any machine and run the .exe .

But I'm not 100% sure what performance would be like :)

Yeah, that would work.  And mostly the performance would be great for all the games except Valley 1 and 2 (original loading times aside).  None of the rest are writing to disk except when you actually save the game, or at least not much.  Valley 1 and 2 write to disk enough that it would probably impact performance when on a flash drive.  Of course you'd also be burning up finite writes on that drive with Valley 1 and 2, which would also argue for just copying the files onto the target computer before launch, heh.