" Crafty "patching system for Unity projects.

Hi, got a question about permissions. Could be a duplicate.

Have Crafty set up on a project for multi platforms, currently testing on OS x. Once set up this has been an excellent solution.
This patch is only applied only while an admin. But on any other privilege setting (Standard, Guest) it stalls when attempting to download the patch. Is this correct? The tick box for force admin is on, but still requires admin privilege to work. Is there any way around this requirement?

 

It's difficult to go around this problem as there is quiet few of security set by the Windows System, ( we are at the end modificating files on the system ), we have few ideas on how to create a solution for this problem, which we will test in the upcoming updates.

 

Ok, sounds interesting. Thanks for the reply!
Do you know of a way to check what privileges a user has from within Unity? that is also cross platform, hmm.
I'm trying to skip an automated update check if the user does not have the required privileges.

 

Hi, So far crafty is working perfectly me!

I have one question. How do you handle 32bit and 64bit version of your game?
Do you treat them as 2 seperate games?

 

Do you mean 'superuser'? At this moment Crafty only supports 'Force Admin' feature on Windows. But we plan to add support for unix-based platforms soon.

Yes. Windows - copy, paste and run function IsUserAdministrator ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ser-is-an-administrative-user/1089061#1089061 ), Linux or Mac OS - probably you need to run start new process "sudo -v" and read OutputStream but not checked yet ( http://superuser.com/questions/553932/how-to-check-if-i-have-sudo-access )

No matter if game is 32bit or 64bit Crafty works the same. Crafty only detect which executable was started and after installing patch brings game back using that executable.

 

Hopefully this question wasn't ask here. I could not find anything related:
Is it possible for crafty to ignore certain files/folders? We store player controls and settings in ini files in the main game folder and I don't want them to be deleted/changed on every patch.

Thanks in advance for answering.

 

We will do our best to think of a way to go around certain files and/or folders.

I want to inform that because of few users that provided us with very detailed reports we will most likely tomorrow or the day after that send Crafty 1.3.2 to the asset store to provide fixes and few upgrades to the script.

 

------
Edit: We fixed the problem. I have been renaming each build since I started dev. Turns out if you rename the version builds with Crafty, it tries to change the name of the data folder, which isn't allowed!

Solution : Name your build the exact same thing between versions, just change the version numbers in Patchie and Launchie.
--------------------------------------

Hello. I just bought and integrated Crafty. I've got a data folder access problem, here's how it goes:

Using the Launchie 1, we set up our server folder, made two versions and all that.
Opening version 0.0.0.14.1, the update to 0.0.0.15 works just as intended up until download and unpack complete.
The game closes and the updater bar shows up, but it sticks at 0% or 2%.

Checking the build version folder holding the build and data folder:
We find the build's name has been updated to 0.0.0.15
The _patch folder has been added holding the 0.0.0.15 data (unsure how complete, no complete process to compare to)
The Error Log reveals that
UPDATER[10/14/2014 12:30:45 AM] System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path 'C:\Users\M\Desktop\0.0.0.14.2\0.0.0.14.2_Data' is denied.

This error persisted after I checked the force admin in launchie and rebuilt.

Hypothesis:
Something to do with Windows 7 and read only folders.
I had to change some permissions on the patch folder to get the first part to work, so I checked on that with the data folder. The folder is set to "read only" and when I un-check and safe, it's still read only if I open it again.
Now, this also appears to be true for all the folders on both of our testing computers, and no other problems have been noted. Not sure how long this folder thing has been going on either.

I would really like to feature y'all's product and get our client auto-updating. ^_^ guidance would be greatly appreciated.

 

Hello Aesop Rebecca,

Yes you cannot change the name of the build project as Crafty will treat it as separate game.

Sorry that i could not come sooner and help you with this but this and the next month our team have so much work we don't have much time even to check the forums. I will do my best to check emails more often.

 

Hello everybody,

Just wanted to inform that from now on you can download newest Crafty and Crafty Beta ( if there will be any ) directly from our website by simply providing Invoice.NO. After connecting your Invoice.NO ( the one that you can find in the PDF provided by Unity Team after purchasing Crafty ) you will be provided with the two links Crafty Beta and newest Crafty.

You can find this section of the website by simply going to the Assets section on our website and clicking the Downloads button. ( HERE )

After you will provide the correct Invoice.NO you should see this.



We created this option because of the lack of time we had this month. Usually we send newest Crafty to every user that provided us with the Invoice.NO but because there is so many of you and we have so little time we decided to give every User an option to do it them self. Hope this will help in the future updates. ( And yes Crafty 1.3.2 is already available on the website even if its not yet on the asset store. )

 

Hi - does anyone know if you can leverage crafty for a game that's distributed on steam? I understand steam handles it's own patching, but maybe the launcher part of crafty can still be useful ?

 

it isn't working properly? han you describe what happens?

edit:
At this moment Crafty only handle updating game. In future there will be some extra features like delivering statistics about client game, login system, and more. It depends on your needs what updating system you will use. If you want to use Steam then you should decide what would be better for you. I dont know how it looks in Steam but Laucher is part of Crafty that runs in game, not external.

 

Nothing happens, I did not start integrating crafty, even if I purchased it on the daily sale I'm just trying to figure out if the steam api replaces or complements a tool like crafty.

 

CRAFTY 1.3.2 is available on the Asset Store.

Changelog:

- Fixed BUG#0012 ( Rewritten Updater for Mac OS - crash before applying patch )
- Rewritten ErrorHandler1/2/3.cs to common file ErrorHandler.cs and fixed minor errors in it
- Fixed error “RandomRangeInt can only be called from the main thread“

 

Hi, I'm having issues with Crafty on the latest version. On unpacking a patch it stops half way and goes no further. any ideas? Only a 50 meg patch.

 

Ok, figured it out, even though I have force admin on, I had to run the game as administrator (right clicking on the exe) then it worked fine. Windows 7.

 

Just in case we will look in to that. Thank you for informing us.

 

Thanks. UAC is set to default on Windows 7. So it appears force admin is not working. I'll check to see if my installer can set the registry so that it always runs the exe as admin, but have a feeling that UAC might override this.

 

@Thinker - an apology! I believe it has everything to do with the installer. Using InnoSetup you have to set the flags to runascurrentuser, otherwise it will hang on the patch update after downloading. Crafty is a great product - keep up the good work and updates. a MUST have product for updating your games!

 

Since updating to 1.3.2 crafty has been broken for me and cannot start it's thread to check for updates.

All I see is:
CompareBaseObjectsInternal can only be called from the main thread.
Constructors and field initializers will be executed from the loading thread when loading a scene.
Don't use this function in the constructor or field initializers, instead move initialization code to the Awake or Start function.

 

I can't seem to get an update that is less than 495 meg when I've only changed something small. My setup (install file is only 345 meg compressed, 900 meg not compressed), so I've stopped using Crafty for now and trialing another solution which is expensive (about $300) but gives me 5-6 meg patch files. Really hoped Crafty could have been the solution as I wanted a built in feature, but 495 meg updates for me with maybe a few hundred people downloading would kill my server or cost a bomb on data with a cloud service. Might be ok if you have a small game and not a large MMO. I've tried everything to get smaller update files and it takes hours, where as the other solution takes 5 minutes.

 

If I edit LaunchieLogic to use a coroutine instead of the another thread for the initial waitTime the Asyncwork thread does get started, however as soon as Launchie.Check(); is called I get a new threading error:

get_enabled can only be called from the main thread.
Constructors and field initializers will be executed from the loading thread when loading a scene.
Don't use this function in the constructor or field initializers, instead move initialization code to the Awake or Start function.

and still cannot check if there are any updates to download.


I really wish you guys would release the source of the code of crafty so us developers could address some of the issues we run into ourselves.


@julianr do you mind telling me what other system you are testing out and thinking of switching too?

 

Hi, i thought that all "...can only be called from the main thread." error where fixed. I will check Crafty one more time.

I'm sad to hear that, because we never had this problem. Only one or maybe two developers had same problem. It is linked with your project. If you can provide us two versions of your game, we will try to fix it. Maybe some changes in patch making algorithm will solve that problem.

edit:
two versions of game that makes so big patch, of course

 

Sure, no problem. I'll send you two downloads. The time it takes to scan through to produce an update is also very time consuming, taking several hours on a 900-1gig build. But that may be because its hanging off Unity. The other solution that I'll not mention here takes about 5-10 minutes, but it's stand alone and produces an install file which then is required to be manually installed, and scans for the installed directory. I'd rather use Crafty, like I said as it's a built in solution and supports multiple platforms where the other is only PC. Hopefully you can come up with a solution or fix for my issue. I understand that other games may produce different update sizes as it may be that one of the asset files is larger than most and so would produce a larger file.

 

Hello here,
and thanks for this great plugin.
I am actually facing a new problem using the last version of Unity 4.6, error that will probably occur in Unity 5.
The error is described as below:

Assets/Crafty/Examples/Test Scene1/Scripts/ErrorHandler1.cs(42,33): error CS0234: The type or namespace name `APIUpdaterRuntimeServices' does not exist in the namespace `UnityEngineInternal'. Are you missing an assembly reference?

Any idea on how to at least surround this?
Thanks.

 

Hello Ciryus
As i stated few posts ago we will be upgrading Crafty for Unity 4.6 when it will be officially released for now it is still in the beta stage ( hopefully it will be released soon ). The same is with Unity 5.0 when it will be officially released we will Upgrade Crafty again to make sure it works perfectly on all versions of the Unity Engine.

In the mean time we will also add few more tweaks to improve Crafty.

BUT thank you for showing us the Error i already send the info to the main programmer just in case.

 

This error is caused by Crafty, because it was builded with Unity 3.5.7 dlls. We can check if rebuilding with 4.6 or 5.0 dll will help. If yes, Crafty will be branched on Crafty for Unity 3.5.7+ and Crafty for Unity 4.6+ ( or 5.0+ if 4.6 dlls won't work ).

 

I was wondering how one would go about creating a patching system that is more dynamic in it's version handling. During my game's beta phase I plan on updating it quite often, and I'm sure some users will skip updates. Does this mean I need to create a patch for each old version to the newest one each time a patch comes out? (Like if 1.3 was the newest then I'd need patches for: {1.0 to 1.3}, {1.1 to 1.3}, {1.2 to 1.3})

Or will crafty iterate through the updates incrementally until it reaches the newest? If it does increment through, does the user need to restart after each version update, or can it do it all in one go? (Like if 1.3 was the latest I'd just need: {1.0 to 1.1}, {1.1 to 1.2}, {1.2 to 1.3})

 

Crafty will download all patches one by one and during restart apply them. So you dont need to create merged patches like 1.0 -> 1.3, 1.1 -> 1.3. Merged patches are helpful when some patches are too heavy. For ex.

1.0 -> 1.1 400MB
1.1 -> 1.2 400MB
1.2 -> 1.3 400MB
1.3 -> 1.4 1MB

then you can create 1.0 -> 1.4, 1.1 -> 1.4 and 1.2 -> 1.4 ( probably this patch can be skipped ). And size of merged patch should be less than sum of single patches.

Additional usage of merged patch is to create patch 0.0 that contains extreme light version of game ( without models, music, videos ), only menu, settings, credits, etc. And make patch to newest version. And you have created simple "downloader". New gamers can download couple of MB and then whole game will be downloaded by Crafty.

 

Great information, Wasikuss! I read somewhere you were planning on implementing a login system as well. This would be useful to verify legit downloaders and filter out others to prevent bandwidth wastage. Is that still on the to-do list?

 

Yes it is on the to do list, but first we want to add Unity 4.6 support Unity 5.0 support, Config system for server selection and connection with the dropbox and or google drive system.

 

Hey guys. I'm trying to port the Launchie over to NGUI, but am having great difficulties understanding the manually multi-threaded examples (why does this even have to be multithreaded in front end script?), mostly because they are completely un-commented. Also, the internal documentation is out of date (Check() now returns an int apparently instead of a bool?), the functions don't have any summaries attached to them for clarity, and the link in your first post for further documentation on your website is broken. Searching through the website will eventually bring you to the correct documentation link here, which is the same as the internal pdf and out of date.

I'm excited to finally get this working because it looks like a really neat tool that has the potential to add a very professional feature that my customers will undoubtedly enjoy. But before I can do that, I could really use some guidance. I'm sure others could benefit from the guidance as well. Thanks for your time!

Also, I'm not quite sure what the code inside of this method is trying to do:
public int Check()
{
int expr_04 = this.Check(false, false);
int result;
if (4 != 0)
{
result = expr_04;
}
return result;
}

This red part is obviously always true, I'm guessing you meant to put expr_04 in there instead of just 4?

 

Disastercake Do you receive any of our emails ?.

You already ask us that on the support email. I asked for your skype name so that our main programmer may guide you step by step how to adjust Crafty for NGUI ( as you requested ).

You may check the spam folder for the email because our support team send you this email 3 minutes after yours.

 

Thanks, Thinker! It did go to the spam folder.

 

Disastercace, sorry for documentation. We made some mistakes, and we are glad that someone noticed this. It's very helpfull to make Crafty without errors/bugs. It will be fixed soon. Don't look at code, because it's obfusctated. If you have any ideas to make Crafty better for you and others than please tell us. We always try to fulfill any suggestions.

 

Hello Everybody, as me and programmer didn't wrote anything in the last week i will do my best to inform everybody on the changes coming to Crafty.

First of all i want to inform that all those changes will be send to the asset store in the next week or two, BUT those who already bought and or will buy Crafty will be able to test it out as a new version preview that will be available on our website soon.

So lets move on to changes.

First the most important part. versions.txt GONE. There won't be anymore versions.txt file as we are moving to full config system which will give you MUCH more freedom over servers and patches.

Thanks to that, we will add something that users were asking us for a long time. DROPBOX support.
Yes from new version you will be able to use free dropbox as a server for your patches. ( we will also test google drive but for now we are talking only about dropbox ).
New config system gives us much more freedom and control over our patches and servers.
This means, multi-server control, dropbox support, patch control and so on.

Second of all Unity 4.6 and new GUI.
As we promised we will adjust Crafty to new Unity 4.6 and we will also provide new demo to the Crafty program showcasing use of new GUI system.

Crafty documentation will be also updated as we were inform that some of its parts are out of date, and because of that we will be working on new Tutorial Video. As many of you know Video tutorial are very outdated and they need to be refresh to the new Crafty program which will have dramatic changes.

I will inform everybody here on the forum when Preview version will be available on the website and when new update will be official send to the asset store.

 

Hello,
glad to hear that you work hard to make your product better. I will follow to test fixes and new features.
But we still have issues with size of patches and looks like we are not alone: julianr noticed similar things.
As I see, biggest files in our build: level0-3, sharedassets0-4 and resources. sharedassets3 has size of ~300mb. I've checked out several patch archives and mostly every of them contains this big size files. So, Crafty is just replaced every big file(if any small difference) by every patch. If so, why use increment patching? In this way it is more effective to have actual version of game on server, compare hash sum of files with client and replace differences. With this approach at least we can sure player will not download more than whole game.

I want to understand how to reduce size of patches. I hope we will solve this and stay with Crafty patching solution.

Thanks.

 

The reason for big files is very simple.

Even when you add as little as a dot in the text of your game Unity won't just add it to the game it will create a completely new project for you with all the files chaotically put together and compress in the big chunks of files like shaderassets, level and so on.

Which means that the changes between the two games is not only that one dot but almost all of the game. Crafty right now searches for differences on a binary level, but even so after finding one it needs to detach that dot and massive chunks of data with it. Which means files are in reality never replaced they are stitched together by differences between the files.

Depending on your settings in Crafty you can get patches from 30 % to 95 % smaller than your actual game with the average of 65 %. ( Yes sorry InfermIndependent i got your PM i used the data from pre Packet Crafty that is why % was so small ).

We are working on much better detachment system that will take smaller chunks of data which at the end will create smaller patches but that takes time and limitation in Unity are not helping us. That is why we prefer to provide better features for Crafty because of the amount of requests we got every day ( like Dropbox support ) and in the mean time working on our main goal which is smaller patches.

 

I don't know what you guys are talking about. Patches are smaller by 90 % to 95 % if the project is not a chaos but nicely put together project. Look your self.

I used Standard settings.


I took two project size. One is:


And the second is.


After exactly 25 SECONDS !


I got a tiny patch of.


So i don't get why you guys have any problems, i never had bigger patches than about 5 to max 10 % of the game size.

On my main project which is about 3 GB in size patches are created after about 4 minutes and their are about between 200 to 390 mb in size depending on the amount of changes i make.

 

Hello InfermIndependent yes i got your PM thank you for noticing my error.

Yes usually you get tiny patches but from time to time we can find a user that have an error that rises his patch size. That is why we update Crafty as often as possible to eliminate such errors. For example not so long time ago there was an error on Linux that made patches much bigger and sometimes " from interesting reasons " it could be even broken. After a fix patches are small and nicely compress.

We need to analyze the problem and improve Crafty to make sure such problems won't appear in the future that is why we are changing for example versions.txt to config system to not only give more power to users but also eliminate 3 errors that we had problems with for about a month.

We won't stop updating and improving Crafty till everybody won't get a nicely compress small patch to update their project like you InfermIndepentent and most of the users.

 

Today I've tried Visual Patch, result is 8.5mb patch vs 186mb Crafty patch for same versions. Very strange.

 

Please don't compare program that works outside of Unity ( and is not limited by Unity ) that is in development since 10 plus years and cost 6 times more.

To program that works inside of Unity and is an in-game patcher and launcher system.

It's like comparing DIAL-UP internet with Broadband and complain that you cannot stream HD movies.

Crafty is in constant development since first version 1.0.0 we added 42 features and we improve every possible system in it, while already making it 3x faster than the first version. There are still many versions to go.

Our main programmer that puts full focus on Crafty is working as often as he can spending every free second of his time. IF Crafty was providing enough money for him to drop his job and focus only on this program i'm sure that we would be already on version 2.0 but alas it is not yet possible.

 

Hi, we know that always someone can find software with better patches than in Crafty. But Crafty is not only patch making software. It integrates with game providing more functionality. We already started working on better patch system, and when we achieve significant decrease in patch size, we will post here results of tests.

Visual Patch uses DeltaMAX ( library from same company ), Take a look in table below, and compare features.

Code (.):

1. +============================================================+
2. |                   |  Crafty  |  Visual Patch  |  DeltaMAX  |
3. |============================================================|
4. |             Platform ( creation and applying )             |
5. |============================================================|
6. |  - Windows        |     X    |        X       |      X     |
7. |  - Linux          |     X    |                |            |
8. |  - MacOS          |     X    |                |            |
9. |  - Mobile         |     F    |                |            |
10. |============================================================|
11. |                           Patch                            |
12. |============================================================|
13. |  Smaller          |          |        X       |      X     |
14. |  Faster           |          |        X       |      X     |
15. |  Integration(1)   |     X    |                |      X     |
16. |  Distribution(2)  |     X    |                |            |
17. |------------------------------------------------------------|
18. |  1 - make it to look as integral part of game, not         |
19. |      external software                                      |
20. |  2 - multiple versions of patches, downloading from        |
21. |      server, release notes                                 |
22. |============================================================|
23. |                         Additional                         |
24. |============================================================|
25. |  Launcher(1)      |     X    |                |            |
26. |  Updater(2)       |     X    |                |            |
27. |  Login system(3)  |     F    |                |            |
28. |  Pulse system(4)  |     F    |                |            |
29. |  Ban system(5)    |     F    |                |            |
30. |------------------------------------------------------------|
31. |  1 - show release notes / news, downloading patch progress |
32. |  2 - automatically apply patches and restart game          |
33. |  3 - prevent unregistered users from wasting network       |
34. |      bandwidth                                             |
35. |  4 - most num. of players on each hour, number of players  |
36. |      grouped by game version ( how many players have       |
37. |      newest version of game ), actual number of players    |
38. |      with info about their country, num. of online players |
39. |  5 - disconnect or ban ( forever / timed ) any player from |
40. |      game                                                  |
41. |============================================================|
42. |                          Price                             |
43. |============================================================|
44. |                   |    $50   |      $395      |    $1495   |
45. |============================================================|
46. |  X - already implemented    F - to implement in future     |
47. +============================================================+

 

Are there any "best practices" to observe to help Crafty make smaller patches?

 

I really like Crafty and understand how cheap it is. Since we don't have access to sources, only thing I can do to help make it better is asking questions and share issues.
I could pay 100$ more if patches will be smaller.

 

We don't want any additional money from people that already bought Crafty as it is against our personal rules to help indie developers as much as we can.

Patches will be smaller as i already said that Crafty is in constant development, even now like our main programmer wrote.

Most likely in few days we will post results as we are at the end stage of creating new patching system.

 

Yes there are, i took me some time to figure it out but it seems that Unity is packing files chaotically and turns them to massive chunks but if you put specific data to the separate folders it tends to make patches much smaller. For example audio to audio folder textures to texture folder and so on. I first discovered this after i used assets store products from
Manufactura K4 his work is always nicely separated between folders. For example before i used that method of working my patches were about 12 to 30 % of the game but after i started to clean my work and put correct assets to correct folders my patches were never bigger than 10 % of the game SOMETIMES even 2 % of the game.

So my rule for future " Keep your place tide and clean, make your patches small like bean "

 

Thanks much for the tips!

 

Interesting tips! Does this mean that every texture in my game should be in one master folder then? At the moment I keep each object in its own folder with its model and texture in there. Should I be moving all of these into a master folder for textures and then a master folder for meshes? I'm afraid that might get a little too bulky in each folder if that's the case.

 

After we will finish our work on new Crafty, we will also test this theory as we are curious as well.
We will post results after all the changes here on the forum for all to be seen.
Results should be available in few days.