" Crafty "patching system for Unity projects.

Unfortunately I don't have internet at home (damn provider -.-). So I'll have to wait 2-3 days till I can buy it
But I'll give you a feedback as soon as possible!

 

We will wait 2 / 3 weeks for everybody that is interested to test it out and send us propositions that they wish to be implemented. So you have a lot of time.

 

Your timing is perfect. My project is going alpha this weekend and this will be a (bandwidth) lifesaver!

I will provide feedback once I try it on my project tonight.

Thanks,

Lee

 

Well LeeAllen i am very happy that i could save you time and work. Thats what we are for.
Please do provide me with feedback and all the upgrades you wish for us to add, we want to improve for all Indie Developers to help as much as we can.

 

Looks great guys! I will be trying this out for sure.

I have a general observation I'd like to share and I hope it doesn't offend you. Everything about this product looks great: you found a good name, the functionality seems solid, and the website is professional. The only thing that gives me pause is your forum presence. Your English seems to be a bit shaky and it makes me question the quality of the software. This probably isn't fair but I'd like to be honest!

The first thing I read about the asset is "Welcome Unity Users i want to present to you, Crafty." which has poor structure and capitalization. This isn't the kind of first impression you want to leave. At the very least your first post should be as correct as possible, which may mean finding someone to proofread. I hope you're able to sort this out because it would be a shame for anyone to pass up this asset over such a silly reason. Don't give them the chance!

One thing that isn't clear from the Launcher documentation is if you can automatically reload your game after Application.Quit(). Is this possible, or does the user have to manually launch the game again after a patch?

edit: I'm also curious about how the patch is applied. For example, say I have a 1GB game and a 100MB patch. Does it patch the game in a separate folder, meaning the user will need an extra 1.1GB of free space to patch?

 

No it dose not offend me, English is still hard for me as i had to learn it outside of my Country Education program, so i would be surprise if i didn't make mistakes in few places.

At the end of patching game can close on its own or you can ask player to do it, as you have to turn it on your self, but we are working on a small addition to Crafty that will do it automatically.

As every good advices i will take it serious and correct the errors as best as i can.

 

Yes, it can be annoying. My English isn't well, because I have never thought that it can be useful to me. I wasn't a good student during lessons of English.

Not exactly 1.1GB. In some cases it can be also 1GB or even 100mb. Because Launchie can apply patch to add, replace or remove files.

 

Just wondering – is there a reason that this would not work in Unity 3.x? Really keen to give it a try.

Btw, we will probably upgrade to 4.x eventually, but we've held off for the time being due to the impact of the upgrade on the production timeline from our project.

 

Hey SixTimesNothing sorry you had to wait so long but we wanted to make few tests to make sure.

For now Crafty works only on 4.x.x because we are using one of the functions from the 4.x, but on 0:00 GMT+2 our programmer will test few new functions that will be available in Crafty 1.1. If everything works correctly Crafty 1.1 will be available on 3.x.x and 4.x.x.

 

Tests are finished, we decided that the best way of dealing with this will be adding another .dll file specifically for 3.4+ Unity version. You will have to delete one that you won't be using and everything will work perfectly.

Because of quite a few people already ask about 3.4+ support, we will update Crafty to 1.0.1, note that its not the 1.1 version that we post few times about, its just the update to support 3.4+ users.

 

Hi Thinker,

Thanks for your response and the testing effort. Much appreciated. I guess everyone will have to move to 4.x eventually, but it's a bit hard for long term projects that were started in 3.x. Also, it's quite a pricy upgrade – so I'm not surprised that a few people have asked about it.

I'm glad to hear that you will be supporting 3.x and we'll definitely be picking up Crafty once it's available for that version of Unity. It's exactly one of the tools we've been hoping for. I look forward to trying it out!

 

We understand the limited resources of indie developers thats the main reason we sell Crafty for only $ 50, we want to help as much people as possible.
Crafty 1.0.1 with Unity 3.4+ support will be send to Asset Store Team today.

 

I can confirm that half of Crafty is now compatible with Unity 3.4+. I haven't checked yet if Lauchie works properly on win / mac.

You need wait little bit more. I can spend time on developing Crafty only at night ( primary work, familly, etc ). I hope you understand.

 

Crafty 1.0.1 is almost done. There will be no additional files. New Patchie can handle Unity version-specific code for 3.4+ and 4.0+. I have yet to check Launchie on mac then we will send Crafty to Assets Store.

 

Crafty 1.0.1 is submitted to Asset Store Team.
It will support Unity 3.4+ versions and while Wasikuss already stated above we successfully change the original PatchieEditor file without adding anything else to the packed.
I will inform all of you when Crafty 1.0.1 will be accepted by the Asset Store team and will be available on the Asset Store.

 

Crafty 1.0.1 is on the asset store but thanks to one of our buyers we found an error in Crafty while its running on Windows 8.
We will skip the version 1.0.2 as it needs to be repair, if everything will go as it should we will submit version 1.0.3 ( with new GUI as example ) to the asset store today.

 

Crafty 1.0.3 is ready with fix on Windows 8 ( 32 and 64bit ) also we included new GUI.
We are submitting Crafty 1.0.3 now.

 

Patchie can't write to my program saved in program files(x86)
Is there any way to fix this?

my patch is 600kb
it goes up until unpacking and then the application is closed and nothing in it is changed
when i start the program again it does the same thing it gets up to unpacking and then closes

as far as automatically restarting the game goes i got around this by including a batch file that waits for my game to close and then waits a second and restarts the game

 

Of course we will deal with it, if you will send me your Order Number to support@penkura.com i will send you Crafty with improved script before it will be available in the asset store.

We already are helping someone with very similar problem we think that Launcher was not updated correctly in 1.0.1, our programmer will take care of it Monday as he is very busy this weekend with other project.

We will add this function to Crafty 1.1 as we want it to work exactly the same on all platforms. ( Windows, Mac, Linux ).

 

I have a question regarding how this actually works practically, since I have looked around a bit and not found a specific answer.

How does patchy actually patch the game itself if it's being used? Are you using a separate process that is run after the patches have been downloaded and patches everything? Just wondering as I want to make sure that everything will be patched correctly .

 

No, Crafty use main process to patch whole game, but not in the same thread. We tested it in many ways and it works. In future releases it will be replaced for separate process, due to possible issues and for auto restart.

 

Hi, I am planning to buy Crafty but I need to know a few things. When creating patchs, does it check every file for changes and grabs anything id didnt have before? I'm using custom files in the the builds data folder so I need to know for sure that it will grab those.

 

Hi judah4 jest Patchie ( in Crafty ) checks all the files between the game folder. This means it will find every changes you made in a project in or outside of the Assets Folder.
Overall in Crafty 1.1 we want to use new type of compressing and patch creation system it will do exactly the same but much more efficient allowing patches to be much smaller than they are now.

For example our Crafty creates game folders like this:

Example game 1.0 --> Example Game --> all the files.
Example game 1.1 --> Example Game --> all the files.

Changes will start to be search not from the example game but from the folder Example game 1.0 to 1.1.

We did this in such way because some developers like to put additional programs outside of game folder but still in the project it self.

 

The patch system - how does it work? Does it differentiate the files from 2 built versions of the game to have minimal download size for the update?

What happens if a user decides to modify a file? Will the patch break everything, or detect it and redownload the file (not the whole game!)

 

Patching system searches differences in the files on a binary level, than takes those files and compresses them as much as it can. ( in Crafty 1.1 that takes all of our time now, we want to improve compressing system to give even more power to the users. )

If the game will be corrupted by the player it cannot be fix by patching system for something like this a Repair System tool kit is needed we think of creating something similar but first we need to make Crafty as stable as possible.

 

This looks fantastic, very excited after I watched the video tutorial. Only questions I have are around Launchie so hope that tutorial is up soon. When I worked on my own launcher I ran into many permissions issues with windows and this would save me a ton of time plus nailing OSX and Linux at the same time.

Is source included? Not a dealbreaker for me as long as it works well out of the box but if something like this had bugs it could really cripple a released project without ability to modify/patch it.

Thanks!

 

Launchie is in-game launcher so its very easy to update thats one of the reasons it will work on Mac, Windows and Linux at the same time.
There is more information about launchie on our website HERE

Video tutorial will be released when GUI will be much more upgraded ( it would be waste of a movie when it will present outdated program ) also video tutorial will be almost the same as written documentation.

When it comes to errors, we have fantastic users/buyers who swiftly send us problems that they found, we have very limited time in this and next week but we do our best to repair them. Each version of Crafty is made after someone finds a problem, so we can improve it for the future.

( I can't lie that there aren't errors being found here and there, that would be unfair to future buyers. However we do our best to repair and improve as fast as our families, work and times allows us. )

 

I'm using the default script that came with it to test the functionality, but I'm encountering an error. Whenever I run it, it says "Game is up to date ", but then proceeds to crash the game giving me an error log.

Here is what the log says:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
3.   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.CheckFinalStatus (System.Net.WebAsyncResult result) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
4.   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.SetResponseData (System.Net.WebConnectionData data) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
5.  

I have only created a version, there are no patches for it just yet, and the url is pointed correctly. Though my web server will return a 404 unless you reach a file.

 

Hello Vox Nephila

Error 404 is not from Crafty its from the server it's usually from broken link or connection to not existence space of the server.

This is not related to Crafty but if you will provide us with the link that you are using we will check it up and tell you whats wrong.

Side note ( Crafty will crash the game because it will check for the update over and over again from a broken link/non existing space of server, so we prefer that it will crash rather than freeze completely ). So if your server will return error 404 Crafty of course will do the same as it is connected to that server.

 

I sent you a private message with more info.

 

I got the message and i already reply to you. It's best if you use our email support@penkura.com as it allows us to support you outside of Unity Forum from more than one of the Penkura Support Team.

 

I'm interested in buying CRAFTY however I have a question. When creating I create a new patch that has 10 new different models, textures and scripts will it only download the items that are missing? And will the scripts new scripts work? I tried using asset bundles for my patching system that I tried creating and it was a pain in the butt.

 

Yes... and no. If you only add them patch should contain only files that you add, but by adding them Unity change some internal game files that will be added too.

 

Hi

we are currently using Crafty with our project and it looks promising and does well. Just needs some fixes here and there.

I found one bug when checking the version with Launchie. If the string of the current version of you game is longer than an entire line in versions.txt, you get an "System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: startIndex + length > this.length"

So, if your version.txt contains:
v1.0 v1.1
v1.1 v1.2

And your game wants to check for updates and has the version:
v1.0_beta_3

The version then check crashes.

 

Thank you for showing us that error. Currently we are fixing more than one issue and we are compliantly changing the patching system as it is well insufficient, we will upgrade it to much more powerful one that will repair some of the problems that are currently bugging us.

This will make patch creation a bit slower but the patch it self will be not only much more stable but also much smaller. ( the way it should be originally )
but i must ask for your patients as this is very complicated process and we don't want to release Crafty with more problems that it currently haves.
( we are talking here about Crafty 1.1 )

 

Hello I just downloaded Crafty and I'm having some difficulty setting it up. When I build and launch my game I get this error: Quit can only be called from main thread. Constructors and filed initializes will be executed from the loading thread when loading a scene.
I'm using the default Launchie GUI code but I replaced the location of the patch to my web hosting provider. Could you help me please? Thanks!
~Alexander

 

Hey Alexander sorry for the late reply but its weekend hope you understand.

This errors happens because Application.Quit() is called from the Launchie and not from the game it self. It is already fixed in the newer version ( this and few other irritating things ) we will send newer version to the asset store in matter of few days we just want to improve the interface for even easier access, as we got tips and request on how the interface could be even more user friendly.

If you will send me your invoice verification number i will give you earlier access to the Crafty before it will appear on the asset store when it will be fully complete.

 

Thanks I sent you a PM with it. Also when will you guys be releasing more video tutorials or at least written tutorials? I feel like I'm lacking enough documentations (and yes I did look through this http://penkura.com/store/). Could you add some extra default scripts showcasing what CRAFTY can do?

 

Tutorial videos ( two of them ) will be released with the newest Crafty.

Biggest plus about Crafty and minus at the same times is that it evolves very fast as we get a lot of requests on what other buyers wish to add to the Crafty because of that tutorials that we made are swiftly out dated. Even the first video tutorial is not in 100 % correct anymore as the folders had been changed to make it easier to use Crafty.

Crafty 1.0.4 haves biggest over all interface change that makes us unable to make video tutorial yet. After that Crafty 1.1 will come that will have new patching creation system but no changes to the interface.

 

I am impressed by Crafty and look forward to seeing it evolve. I hope you continue to enhance and support it for a long time to come!

That being said, if we purchase Crafty, will we always have access to the latest versions? Or do you think you'll ever come out with a 1.1 or 2.0 type of product that will require an upgrade fee or other potential cost increase?

If we purchase Crafty, do we have access to source code and the rights to extend or enhance it ourselves? Would that be additional licensing?

 

Don't be worried about the price of Crafty no matter how much we will upgrade the code, Crafty for Windows, Linux and Mac will always cost $ 50 and the price will not be increased.

Crafty is generally two scripts.
One is for creating patches this script is secured and lock as any change to it can end in braking Crafty but as i said it is only Patch Creation system so you generally won't ever change anything in it.

Second script is Launchie that on the other hand is fully open and you can change anything you wish in it. It is even advice to play with it as it is the GUI of the Launcher you will be using, we want to make sure that it is as easy as possible for you to adjust Launcher for your game.

 

I have just found this post a couple of days ago, have a few questions if you could answer them.

As you say tat it is now built into unity, does this make the launcher level 0 in the build process?
If not how easy/hard is it to de-activate the launcher and patcher for a release without the feature, I am planing on using steam int he future possibly, in which case they have their own update system, so to switch it off for steam and switch it on for non-steam would be fantastic.

There was also a comment about patching multiple versions at once, this would be very helpful if it was an added feature.

is there/ will there be a a file checking system to make sure that the download is not corrupt, and if it is to delete the patch file before it attempts to install and possibly automatically try to re-download the patch?

Finally, when using the patcher, can you integrate this with a webpage using .php to log into the online database for account verification

 

Launcher will be on the level that you will choose it dose not have to be level 0.
You can send a patch to your game that will disable launcher. NOTE you wont be able to turn it back on threw the patch as it can't download anymore.

Before Launcher will download anything it will ask the Release note on all the patch versions available on the server/website.
It means that if you have on your website/server patches 1.0 -> 1.1 , 1.1 -> 1.2 , 1.2 -> 1.3 ... and so on.
The game will search for patch on its own version and higher.
No matter what version you have if there is one version higher it will download it. ( this is already implemented in the Crafty from the version 1.0.0 ).

We are working on that and we should add this in the future versions.

Launcher is in-game script like every other it means you can add everything you would be able to add to normal game. No matter if its log-in system, player checking system or others. Launcher will check for updates when you will tell him too you just need to add that to the script.

 

Thanks for the quick response.
Have you got an ETA for the self check feature?

also there was mention of needing a .dll for unity 3.4+ is this separate to the asset store package, or will there be a release with this .dll as it currently still says only for unity 4+

 

I can't say when the self check will be available as we are working hard on Crafty 1.1.

Sorry for that dll. Crafty that is now on the asset store WORKS perfectly on 3.4+ and higher the asset store just didn't updated the info. It will be changed soon.

 

I can't get a patch to actually extract. I made a really simple example of two scenes. The first build is version 1.0 and the second is 1.1. I have it hosted on local server and it definitely downloads. But as soon as it goes to extract the launcher quits and I get this errlog

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.ZipException: Wrong Local header signature: 0x1322644C
at ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.ZipInputStream.GetNextEntry () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at (wrapper managed-to-native) System.Reflection.MonoMethod:InternalInvoke (object,object[],System.Exception)
at System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.MonoType.InvokeMember (System.String name, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object target, System.Object[] args, System.Reflection.ParameterModifier[] modifiers, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture, System.String[] namedParameters) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at System.Type.InvokeMember (System.String name, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object target, System.Object[] args) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at LaunchieLib.Launchie.Extract () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

I really don't know what I could be doing wrong or maybe its something with the launcher?

 

Check your email. I send you letter with information about the possible solution.

 

In the next 24 hours we will be sending Crafty 1.0.4 to the asset store with dozens of fixes and many addition to the Crafty plug-in.
We just need to upgrade our documentation for Crafty and change data on our website.

For now i can present you Part 2 of our video tutorial that will share some light on Crafty.
Note that this tutorial is made using Crafty 1.0.4 that will be soon available in the asset store.

 

Great video, thank you! Are you planning support for automatically restarting the game after a patch? Are there technical limitations to make this impossible? I hate to make the user manually run the game again, especially in the case of a beta with frequent patches.

 

sinoth nothing is impossible.
We will make it happened as soon as possible maybe even in Crafty 1.1.