Expansion Packs & Game Cycle Patching

Hi there,

So I had seen this asked on numerous occasions on the Epic Games forums, and I never really found a clear answer to it. This is for when we finally are able to cook and release games and a concrete pipeline is established for cooking games in the UE4 architecture. The suggestion is intended for both single AND multiplayer games.

Will there be a means to natively support DLC and bug patching from game developers? It wouldn’t be uncommon, especially with C++ to experience bugs and the need for expansion after product is released to market.

Another thing that makes this necessary is that people don’t have to go in and fix the bug in question, recook the WHOLE game, and then re-release some megalithic binary to the public. They can just download a patch file so that the experience can continue as normal.

Maybe this functionality was already integrated with UE3, but again never found any clear documentation for it. It’d be nice to know if it’s in the UE4 roadmap, and how the team would proceed about this.

+1 to this.

with the inclusion of UAssets in detriment of UPKs, we have a step in the right direction.

and with the way rocket projects are made now (a dll), I can see how patching game code should be easier now. then again with UDK we had the compiled myGame.u files which in theory should’ve made game-patching easier, but didn’t due to the way the whole thing was cooked.

so if the cooking process is like UDK’s this time around, UAssets and game-dll will mean nothing in this regard

With game code in a C++ DLL, yes, it is very easy to patch that (just replace the DLL!)

For content, we cook the assets into their original packages - we don’t munge a bunch together. So, replacing an asset would be as easy as replacing that one file… except that we expect games to package up their assets into .pak files. This isn’t so bad, tho, because they are still individual files inside the .pak file, and it would not be hard at all to have patch .pak files where the files in them replace the files in the original .pak file. It would cause the install to grow however, since you would have the original and the patched assets on disk (just one would never be being read off disk).

I am not aware of any concrete work that has been done for patching or DLC yet, but the way we have designed the cooked file layout (and game .dlls), it will be muuuuch more straightforward in UE4.

Josh

We now have release and patching documentation:

Cheers