We already have FF on Desura, which can do that. The delay involved in patching is mainly a matter of us doing the work and making sure it's ready to ship.

Awesome. Glad to hear it. :D

a: not everyone uses desura, personally I find it very inconvenient compared to a built in auto updater. that and its slow to boot lags everything up and just annoying all around.

b: have you ever played Modern Combat or Eastern Front while these both are CoH mods I've never seen a source mod with an auto updater so these are my examples. the idea is that that when you boot the game you go through the auto updater first then go to the game. This I think would be a big step forward from even Desura. Just because something kinda works doesn't mean it works. for all those people that A don't use Desura and B just want to update the game be done with it. they don't have to go out of there way to use an for auto updater. then were are also reliant on desura which kinda defeats the purpose of becoming self sufficient.

to my knowledge the coh auto updater work by gathering the download link from the website and boom it downloads it for you. you could even put the news page up on auto updater like Modern Combat.as well as a link to all your media outlets.

shouldn't cost a dime either, as it just access the download link and downloads for you.

Quick question -- is it in the devs' philosophy to release one major patch every once in a fairly long time? Or would they consider releasing smaller patches more frequently with smaller fixes that, in the end, all add up to increasing the quality of the game as much as one major patch?

I think smaller patches is the way to go, but there are some realities that make that difficult. We have a very small number of active devs, with very little time to actually devote to the mod. So some task that might seem minor can take a matter of weeks, especially if it requires a number of devs with different skills to work together.

The process of releasing is not very streamlined. First, there are a lot of unfinished features in the beta build that aren't ready to ship, so we end up having to create a release version, separate from the beta, and merge all the finished changes into that. Then there's testing, packaging, publicity, uploading to mirrors, etc. all before any users have to worry about patching.

And there's feature creep. Even when we set out to do a bug fix patch, new features get finished and we include them in the change log, which can sometimes cause delays. Because we don't have long term release dates, the larger patches are simply released when we have a bunch of finished features that are ready to go and we are tired of sitting on them.

I'd like to move to a more regular patch schedule, such as monthly or quarterly, but I don't know if we have the manpower to keep to any schedule.

But yeah, an auto-updater might be something to look into and I'd be surprised if there wasn't free software/libraries that we could incorporate to help us do that. Tbh I don't use Desura either. It can be useful for downloading HL2 mods but I don't want it running on my system all the time.

What's amazing to me is why Valve hasn't given us Steam workshop for HL2 mods. We have auto-updating mods for Skyrim and now Civ 5, why not for their own game?

I for one have been shit for activity for a while now. I get stuck with work related coding in my spare time.

Aren't mods like Dystopia available on Steamworks? Aren't they also using Source SDK 2006 like FF?

Dystopia is indeed available on Steam.

ff is better off without steamworks if you ask me. valve will probably force us to use .gcfs or who knows what they will do. Besides, is it that hard to download an installer and run it once a new patch comes out? ff devs don't churn them out every friday.

No, but it's an inconvenience. Considering how few active players this game has, downloading automatically would help retain some of those players who simply wouldn't bother with going to some third party site(this site) just to have to look for the correct update. What if that person has an older version of FF and doesn't know which download to use? Steamworks would be perfect for updating this game, but the alternative is a third party software like I suggested up top.

Looking into this. Might have found something that could work, but don't want to speak too soon.