We are looking for some documentation on how to implement an autopatcher for our game that we have published. Currently, we have to make a build, post it to our site and people have to uninstall the old and reinstall the newer. While i see this “Autopatcher” in almost any IOS/Android game i’ve ever played, i dont see any documentation online about how to create one, or any plugins that exist… perhaps i’m searching the wrong buzzwords in google searches. I’ve tried things like “UE4 Project Autopatcher” or “Video game patcher” but have come up blank on most results.
Can yall point me in the right direction on buzzwords or some links that maybe helpful for us to develop this if you have any? That would be greatly appreciated!
I believe the term you’re looking for is Delta Update. Both iOS and Android support this concept and handle it automatically for you when you update your app on their stores. Steam also has a similar system for deploying updates.
If you wanted to do this for a mobile game distributed directly from your website, you going to have some trouble. This feature part of the server side processing and management of you app package.
However if you’re trying to do this for a pc game. You could make yourself a little patcher system built on top of something like zpaq to generate a delta compressed binary. Alternatively you could look for a tool based on GDIFF which is the algorithm used by Google for the Android diffs. One way or another it won’t be a work-free process. You may find this stack overflow post helpful as well.