Question about increment patching and how to do patch properly

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi guys~:)
I am studying patching recently. I have tried the pages about Releasing and Patching in the doc, and it works fine

But my question is how to make increment patching. The doc says patch is based on a release version of game, remove the old patch when a new one based on the same release is available. If this is the only way to patch, then after tons of changes and patches, the patch will be larger and larger, nearly the size of release size. At that time patch is useless, I could upload a new release version already…like after patch ver1.0.9, make a new release ver1.1, and patch it ver1.1.1

Is there a way to do increment patching based on the old patches? or is uploading a new release version is the right thing to do?

Even refer to increment patching, I don’t know if it’s really a good thing. If I made a change to the same asset in several patches, keep all the patches in the hard drive will consume a lot more space than needed

Afterall how to do patch properly? I checked the answerhub and didn’t find satisfying answer, so I post here:)

PS:The Releasing doc page says “Steam will allow you to upload full packages of your game and do the updating process for you”, my aim is to make steam game but I haven’t try the sdk yet, Is steam really free me from bothering about patching?
PS2:What about version change of Unreal Engine, if my release is 4.12 and I want to make it to 4.13, How could I update it properly? Can patching do the job?
PS3:How to uninstall a patch? I mean if my new patch has bugs, is there a way to let the user fall back to the old version?
PS4:Never thought to have so many PSs, there won’t be a PSneo:)

2

Finally the forum is back on, it seems a good time to bump

Hope not against the rules that anyone curious about this topic is welcome to bump too:)

3

If you are on Steam (and I believe Itch too), you just keep making your build and place it in an folder, then using the steam SDK, steamcmd diffs your build and creates a patch for your users. It only uploads this difference to steam back end. Its very good and very efficient. Itch has something called Butler to do the same thing.

If you were on console though you would need to keep each build archived and build a patch of each one from the previous version.

4

If I had a release R1, which is the first release

then I patch it and get P1, at the same time make a R2

then I patch R2 and get P2, at the same time make a R3

then I patch R3 and get P3…

When patching I just upload P1 P2 P3, and the system will identify them automatically, is that right?

5

Thats the expected flow yes. Last time I played with the PS4 patching tool was a year ago though and I genuinely can’t remember if you always patch from R1 and generate a bigger patch each time so I can’t say with 100% certainty. It should force the users to got through each patch one at a time.

6

My “bigger patch” refers to kinds of content patch, I could keep adding new content through each update, so always patch from R1 will cover the early content several times

8

I try do patch my game on steam, but I have problems to do it right. Can you told me how to make a patch with the steam SDK?

9

I was able to figure out what my problem was. I use two different Depots. When I upload my build in the same depot steam automatically handle the patching process.

10

Hello guys,
Any suggestion on this topic?

I tired this flow :

but when i try to create a release based on another release gave me a Critical error, it’s okay if i make R2 based on nothing but in this case problem is P3 contains P1 and P2 inside himself and it’s not good . I want each of them separate.

Another problem i have is with priority…
How engine should know P1, P2 and P3 priority order ?