" Crafty "patching system for Unity projects.

Hey Shawn67 sorry for late reply but yesterday was Easter and our team didn't work . Just like we aren't working today as we are spending last few hours with our family, sorry about the delay. We will be back as soon as possible working on Crafty.

Toward your question. Crafty is not only being used by web host but also by servers, you just need a URL connection with the server that will allow Lunchie to read the data from the versions.txt and be allow to download the patches.

Most of our users use home made servers, as their project would not be handled by a simple web host.

I got the email and already reply to it.

 

Two links would be very helpful! If that's something you can add in the near future, we would be most pleased

 

Yes of course we will add it as soon as possible. I will talk with the main programmer in 3 hours and ask if we can do it today.

 

In Crafty 1.2.1 we are going to add config file as replacement for versions.txt. Then you will be able to specify global url for patches and set different url of each patch if you need.

There are some things we need to check on Mac OS and Linux before Crafty 1.2 would be submitted to assets store. It will be released in this week. We also plan to release Crafty 1.2.1 next week.

IMPORTANT! ETA for Crafty Standalone was dramatically changed. Earlier we planned to done Crafty Standalone in about 2 months after next major version of Crafty for Unity ( 2.0 ). But one thing was needed - we wanted to implement binary patches. Now we decided to give you Crafty Standalone much earlier. ETA was set to 3 weeks and release date is second half of May. After that we will start working on binary patches

 

THAT IS AN AWESOME NEWS !!.

Also i wanted to ask you guys what you are thinking on Game patcher ( someone else is putting standalone patching system and i wonder of your opinion ).?

 

I did check his product and did a typical Crafty tests on 8 projects and i found something that we had in Crafty 1.0 i even wrote a post to him finding my results as a friendly developer to developer advice on how to fix it but than i decided to take it down few seconds later as i was advice that some people may think about this in a different way than it was intended. And because of that i rather not say anything at all to not create any assumptions in any user.

 

Can you tell what you found ? I am very curious

Also i want to ask what features will be added to Crafty Standalone overall ?

 

No sorry i will not post any opinion a developer respects others developers work a rule that is good to fallow So please no more questions about other products a less it effects Crafty in some way and you want to ask for help to adjust Crafty only.

Crafty Standalone will have all the features requested in Crafty for Unity. Over 100 Developers ask us features and additions we don't want their requests go to waste that's why we will update Crafty Standalone with those features.

We decided to create Crafty Standalone much sooner as yesterday and a day before that we receive an unusual amount of request for it, that's why we decided that we will release Crafty Standalone much sooner BUT without the full binary system as it will take additional month to create. Also we need to make sure that both Crafty for Unity and Crafty Standalone will have as much powerful binary system so that no users will feel left behind.

Most likely today we will release Crafty 1.2 in worst case scenario tomorrow. After that we will release 1.2.1 with few requested features and than we will focus on Crafty Standalone and Binary.

 

This is amazing news ! I am very happy that we will finally get it .

I still am very frequent user of in game launcher as it fits my smaller project perfectly thats why i want to ask what else you want to put to Crafty for unity ? What i want to know is what else you want to add till you will feel that Crafty is completed what we can expect ? and once again awesome that you are doing standalone guys we have waited a long time .

 

Really great tool, I just purchased it and it's exactly what I was looking for!

Perhaps this is a silly question, but I noticed when building my standalone app you must to specify the OS to build to. I assume you must build to all OSX/WIN/LINUX targets individually (if you're targeting all platforms) when creating a new version. How does this work with updating to an new version, and specifically the versions.txt file?

What is the process to handle patches for multiple (individual) target OSes?

 

Crafty for Unity just like Crafty for Standalone will be updates as much as possible mostly because we often get request for additional features that we very enjoy to add . But what Crafty needs till WE will be happy is.

- Full binary patch creation ( this is the most important feature that we want to add, it will create as little patches as it is possible and we work on this features the most from all other features ).
- Update Crafty for Unity to Unity 5.+
- Create new GUI for test scene using new GUI system that should be introduce to Unity 4.6.
- Add Config. to allow download patches from multiple servers.
- Ability to download all patches at the same time and not one by one ( this is already added in Crafty 1.2 which should be released today ).
- Outside patching system to make patching much more stable and hopefully error free ( this is also added in Crafty 1.2 )
- Rewrite ENTIRE Crafty to make it faster more stable and overall easier to use for any one who would want to do any modification to Launchie logic or Launchie GUI.

Of course we will still accept request from any user to add any feature as we wan't to make Crafty as powerful as you users want.

Overall Crafty creates patches from two builds that you select that's that's why you can just select two builds from mac,windows or linux and Crafty will create patches from the differences between them. ( also this system is more user friendly towards people who use third party programs in the builds outside of Unity as often we get request to update Crafty towards some kind of third party program ). Overall all patches type can be located in one folder on your server and all the information about patches also can be located in one versions.txt.

It means that if you write a specific sequence in versions.txt for example:

1.0_mac 1.1_mac
1.1_mac 1.2_mac
1.0_win 1.1_win
1.0_linx 1.1_linx

Crafty will located specific patch based on names. If your game is set ( not named ) as 1.0_mac Crafty will search anything that is meant to be used for 1.0_mac, which will be changed to 1.1_mac in this case and so on and so on.

Thanks to such solution you have much more power on what system should be downloaded it means you can have 3 types of Mac project dedicated for beta testers, players and so on.

Also

Happy to help .

 

I believe this question was asked before but I'm having trouble searching this thread: does Patchie work when the game is installed in Program Files on a Windows machine? During our tests, it stalls out during the unpacking process. I'm pretty sure this is a permissions issue since the patching works when the game is installed on the desktop. Is there any way to fix this?

 

Yes this is 100 % permission problem that happens on Windows usually at the driver that System is installed on. ( it happens only when its located on the system folders ) the only fix for this is like you said installing the game.

This is not something we can just fix unfortunately as every program that is not installed on the systems folder will be ask for administration permission to have any type of access.( to those folders of course ).

 

So just to clarify, there is NO way to make Patchie work if the user installs the game within Program Files?

 

If the user INSTALLS your game in program files than it should work without a problem. Also this problem happens in a lot of program of this type not only Crafty.

We are working on a small solution for this problem that should work but we don't make promises ( thats why we didn't even mention this yet ).
For example most users don't have this problem with me included if you have turn off Administration restriction. Only users with permissions restriction set to high will see this problem.

 

We have not been able to get the patches to unpack correctly even after installing the game into Program Files. It just hangs about halfway through the unpacking process and does not proceed. It does not produce an error text file, either. Is it possible this is some other issue?

EDIT: Running the game as an administrator works, so there is clearly still a permissions issue. Are we doing something wrong?

 

Like i already stated above:

This is not something we can turn off, and a lot of programs have this issue, BUT in Crafty 1.2 we rewritten 40 % of the script ( that's why it took so long ) providing made from scratch new installation system ( after downloading patch ) which is outside of the game not inside. This may fix the problem or at least make it less annoying.

 

Is there anyway to prompt the user at least that their permissions are inadequate, or to bring up the dialog that asks if they want to allow changes to their computer? We can work around this if there's at least a way to show that there's been an error - but the fact that the unpacking process just hangs, and gives no indication anything is wrong, is a big problem.

 

We have send Crafty 1.2 to the asset store that should fix this issue ( our mailing system is not operating properly as we are changing the server provider which makes us unable to send updates to the users directly ).

If this won't help than we will indeed create some kind of pause between the installation and the windows security that will show the message asking for permission, in Crafty 1.2.1 that should be made in a week or so, that is IF you will still have a problem of course.

I will try to send Crafty 1.2 again using our mailing system but our server provider makes this problematic.

 

Great! I look forward to trying the new build. How does one get on your mailing list? If it works, getting the build as soon as possible would be fantastic.

 

Its very easy, you just send me your Invoice NO. ( the one you receive after buying Crafty ) with a request that you want to next version before it will be released on the asset store. ( BUT because of this problem with the server provider i strongly advice to not send it now as i may not receive it sorry about that )

 

Is this something that is possible yet Thinker? You responded that maybe in Crafty 1.1 but I'm not seeing anything else mentioned about it.

 

This is already made in Crafty 1.2 that is send to Asset store. You will see it when the Unity will update the Crafty on the asset store .
Sorry that you had to wait so long but this was only possible with the outside installing system that we just made.

 

I'm not yet a customer.. Just now looking at patching and you guys are top of the list of what I'm looking at.. I just noticed that post and wanted to see if this was something that you got working. Good to know it is in 1.2.. One step closer to hitting the buy button... lol Thanks for the quick response..

 

We are doing our best it should be sooner but there were over 20 features requested ( and made of course ) since 1.0.5 it takes a lot of our time .

 

When Crafty was send to the asset store ? Today or saturday ?

Also as much as i love Crafty in unity i would love to know when Crafty standalone will be available exactly ? I really love your product it dose exactly what you said on the videos and here on the forum but my project requires outside launcher as our login system is already outside of the game.

And i want to add something that i notice here on this thread a lot lately, you are answering people after few minuts, how do you do that ?.
What i want to say is that this is one of the best supporting thread i ever saw you treat your buyers better than a typical company. You guys deserve much more attention than this and if i could give you guys another 5 stars i would for the support alone !.
Also i you guys need to find more programmers to keep up with our features requested i notice that you already give everything we ask for but it probably slows you guys down with the release of the standalone version. Did you try to ask on Unity Forum for help ? There is a lot of programmers that i am sure would give you a hand with Crafty as you and wasikuss already give your full attention as you already said on the forum. Seriously look for more programmers on the Unity forum you will be surprise how much good programmers are there.

 

Crafty was send to the asset store this weekend.

We are close to finishing it, it may be available on the asset store in 3 weeks, i will make separate thread for it as soon as it will be accepted by the asset store team. ( but i will inform few days before on this thread when Crafty Standalone will be send to the asset store ).

My PC, laptop and phone are connected with my email system, because my work and hobby requiters me to spend my time on my computer it's easy for me to reply as soon as possible. But it is not always possible for me to answer, as i am one of those people who get sick often ( at least lately ) and it makes it a bit hard to sit on the computer all day long.

Thank you for your kind words it means a lot to me and Wasikuss that we can help so many developers with their projects/games.

To be honest i really never thought of asking for help with development on unity forum. I may try this sooner or later thank you for the tip .

 

Just another quick question - while trying to get crafty working I had trouble pointing it to the right url (trying to get it to work with AWS, but that's a whole different problem). I noticed that when trying to connect to an unavailable host it was simply hanging on the "Checking for updates..." part of the GUI. Is there any way to perhaps set a timeout if it can't connect, and prompt the user with an "Can't connect, try again later" error message or something?

I'm also having problems where it locates the patch, and after hitting the download button it stays stuck at 0%

EDIT: Found a crafty_error.txt telling me "The authentication or decryption has failed.", and played around with the permissions on AWS S3 and got it working, But it would be nice to be able to handle errors like these with an error screen in game!

EDIT 2: Not working again, not sure why now, but is hanging on "Checking for updates..." again on WINDOWS build only, everything works as it should on OSX. Hmmm. Started the project again from scratch with the same error.

I'm just trying to figure out the proper workflow to get this working without any hiccups, any input would be great!

Thanks!

 

We added a timeout request as a feature for Crafty 1.2.1

We will create our own AWS sever and make some tests to adjust Crafty for future use of AWS.

In Crafty 1.2 we added more sample scenes. One of them shows how to display errors ingame.

 

Perfect, thanks!

Alright, that sound great. Using S3, I simply created a bucket and gave it a custom policy

Code (csharp):

1. {
2.     "Version": "2012-10-17",
3.     "Statement": [
4.         {
5.             "Sid": "AddPerm",
6.             "Effect": "Allow",
7.             "Principal": "*",
8.             "Action": "s3:GetObject",
9.             "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::myBucketName/*"
10.         }
11.     ]
12. }

And then created a "patches" folder inside the bucket, pointing the Launchie URL to: https://s3.amazonaws.com/myBucketName/patches/

I can connect to the versions text directly in the browser (along with the patch files, on both OSX and WINDOWS).
However, testing a WIN build of the unity standalone I receive the same error as above.
Testing a OSX build works flawlessly.

Wonderful, I'll keep my eye out for the update on the Asset store!

Thanks again, keep up the great work!

 

It appears that our email system is back online ( still some people are not receiving files just the message ) but i am trying to send Crafty 1.2 to the users who requested update one more time hopefully this time it will work as it should .

 

Suddenly 5 email appear from you at the same time all with Crafty inside but different message each. Seems i have 5 copy's of Crafty now woo hoo .

I really like this update i feel in love with IN game error log thank you for adding this, i create my own launcher using scene 2 and scene 3 works awesome .

And i have another request for future update i know that this is only test scene and i should make my launcher not you guys but can you add something,
one more thing, is it possible to make all patch release notes appear in one window one by one ( one after another like in one text window ) with a scroll after downloading all patches ? It would be nice addition to see all patches in one window i dont know that much about programming to handle this my self i would really appreciate your work . Thats all from me and like DMeville said keep up an amazing work !

 

Sorry about that as i mention few times already we had a problem with our servers it seems that it works correctly now.

I understand that you want all release notes to be merged in one big window at the end of downloading all patches from newest to oldest ??
If i understood it correctly than yes of course we can do a fourth test scene with this addition of course. It should be ready in Crafty 1.2.1 which should be release in a matter of weak max two. As there is few more additions requested by other users that we want to implement. Like for example .config system.

 

Hey thinker just wanted to thank you as I got the email.
This is proving to be a great system.

 

Thank you for informing me s3rraph, and i am very happy that you like Crafty me and Wasikuss still think we can add and improve MUCH more in it and we will of course .

 

Hi, I'm sorry, but I made a mistake. The latest version of Crafty was built on bad source files. I have backups of all versions, and this time I choose files as base for 1.2. But base version wasn't latest. Today at night (around 0:00 UTC) we will send corrected version to all who gave us Invoce No. It will be Crafty 1.2.1 with additional features. Keep in touch

 

CRAFTY 1.2 is on the Asset Store.

NOTE: As Wasikuss stated above we made a small mistake and did not send the correct LaunchieLogic.cs ( Crafty 1.2 works but it script LaunchieLogic is not up to date ), we will send as soon as possible Crafty 1.2.1 to all users with the Invoce.No ( that already send us request ) and we will ASAP send Crafty 1.2.1 to the Asset Store we are very sorry for this error.

v. 1.2

+ Entire documentation was rewritten.
+ 40 % of the Crafty code was made from scratch to introduce outside patching solution.
+ Added new security measure to make sure patches are installed properly.
+ LaunchieLogic now requires to set a name of the project that will be patch by Crafty.
+ Added Crafty API documentation.
+ Added notes on outside patching system to the documentation.
+ Added more detailed notes in documentation on patch creation process.
+ Patches will be downloaded all at once and installed in the correct order by the outside Crafty installation system.
+ Fixed BUG#0011 Some shaders were not installed properly by Crafty.
+ Added new parts of script in .dll in preparation for new .config system. (which will be available in Crafty 1.2.1 ).
+ Crafty will now automatically turn off the game and turn it back on after game is properly patched. ( showcased in Test Scene two )
+ Added in-game error log option. ( showcased in test scene three )
+ Added outside patch installation system with window that indicates installation process.
+ We added a new font for Crafty Linux versions to properly show launcher as Linux don’t have standard Ariel font.
+ Added second test scene featuring automatic download process without player interaction.
+ Added third test scene featuring new addition to Crafty ( in-game error log preview ).

View attachment 98083

 

Hi, I've just updated to 1.2 and when I try to run Patchie on the Mac version of our client, it seems to be creating an .exe file - is this the external installer you were talking about? How do we get this to work for our Mac version?

I've set the executable to an .app file in this case, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

 

This is the problem that Wasikuss reported we are fixing it now and we will send 1.2.1 with fix to the asset store ASAP.
We will also send 1.2.1 to all users that gave us Invoice.NO.

 

OK, I'll look for that. Thanks!

 

I keep getting a crafty error when i release an update the error is
cannot apply file:
C:\Users\Logan\Desktop\Game builds\fall of oracle dev build\Season pass\fall of oracle_Data\sharedassets0.assets

PLEASE HELP!!!

 

It's strange, because I tested patch with sharedassets0.assets, and everything was updated successfully.

Sorry my mistake, I work only on Win and Lin. My laptop is too old to handle Mac. I have found that updater.exe works fine on Win and Lin ( using Mono, which was defaultly installed in my Lin ). It's written in C#, but now I'm rewriting it in Java.


Sorry all, for such delay. My daughter is sick since previous year, and two days ago I got infected from my daughter. Two nights in a row I have a fever 39'C and I hope that I will soon be healthful.

 

ERROR
Keep getting an error, comes up with a message box saying "updater cannot run directly" Is this currently being fixed?

 

Yes right now with Wasikuss we are working on this and on Mac, ( as we got access to one from our tester. )

 

Crafty 1.2.1 is almost ready besides repairing few errors we added also few features requested by the developers, the main one being the " Timeout " feature. Where Crafty will await the respond from the server, after few seconds of not receiving any respond Crafty will show the TIMEOUT error.

We will also move the .Config option to the Crafty 1.2.2 as we want to release this update as soon as possible understanding that some users have problems with Crafty. Because of the.config addition requested by one of the developers, we will add few additional options of allowing multiple URL links to the servers ( as it is was also requested by the developers ). Thanks to that even if the TIMEOUT error will appear Crafty will be able to check other servers for the possible update.

Also as i stated previously this time we will send Crafty 1.2.1 as BETA to all the developers who had any problems, if they will respond with no error in the Crafty we will send Crafty 1.2.1 to the asset store. ( we don't want to make an error like we did with Crafty 1.2 to send product without checking 100 % of the functions. ).

 

Good to hear that you guys are not slowing down and are still providing with new features but i have request can you please make this timeout system in new test scene like you did the rest ? It would be easier to see new features in separated projects.

I do not have any problems with Crafty 1.2 but can i still have access to the beta ? I would like to see the feature and test it out on my project.

Cheers.

 

Sure If there will be any feature hard to describe or to show, we will add test scene.

Beta wersions will be available to all who bought Crafty. Just send us your Invoce No.

 

Thanks Wasikuss.

Also because of the new patching system you mention in the changelog, how patching process looks now exactly ?
AND i notice that file updater.exe when turned on by me shows "updater cannot run directly" is this something i did or is it an crafty error ?

 

I will write down the process in steps:

1. After game is turn on, Launchie sends message to your server via the URL you wrote down to request information on the patches.
2. Launchie by checking versions.txt ( which soon this part of the process will be changed ) searches for the patch.
3. Launchie downloads patch informations and prints them out on your launchie window. ( informations are: size of the patch, update number, and patch changelog ).
4. After clicking download button Launchie downloads the entire patch and create updater.exe
5. After entire patch is being downloaded game is being turn off.
6. Updater.exe ( patchie ) is opening the patch and installs it. A window pop-up is appearing with indicator on installation process.
7. Updater.exe is turning on the game and deleting it self from the folder.
8. Game is turn on and information that game is up to date is printed on the window. OR go back to step 1.

This error appears when you manually try to patch the game. Overall updater is doing everything him self in Crafty 1.2 it is visible and it is deleted AFTER your turn on the game. Because of that sometimes users click updater.exe by them self which is not a good think.

That's why from Crafty 1.2.1 updater.exe is invisible and players will never see it.

 

That explains a lot to be honest i thought that i have to click it manually .

Thats awesome keep up the good work and send me 1.2.1 when its done i want to test the beta badly.