Is GOG going to have standalone updates to the game, or will you have to have it running on the net to patch?

I would also like to know this, the game just downloaded a patch but I want it to be completely standalone. I want to be able to install the game fully up to date, even if I don't have an internet connection. That is why I buy games from gog.

Someone has taken this discussion as an example of how unfair demands GOG users have:

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15249.msg169107.html#msg169107

So guys, sorry to break it to you, but apparently you are pirates just for wanting a standalone updater for your legit GOG game. :)

I don't know about the GoG userbase as a whole, but as far as you're concerned I know how to spot a strawman when I see one.

You may disable the automated updates from the settings menu.

(edit: just to clarify for those people wanting their games to keep "radio silence" : this specifically prevents it from using the internet to check for updates; iirc nothing else in the game tries to open a network connection for the game's process, though if you click on the recent-changes button it will ask your OS to open a browser window to our release-notes wiki)

We (I'm a developer at Arcen Games) generally do lots of "beta" patches between each "official" patch (though I don't know if Chris labeled 1.001 as a beta or an official). Doing full installers and whatnot for every beta patch would slow us down a ton. It's the difference between something like a 5 minute process and something like a 2 hour process, and we have to run about as fast as we can to keep up with stuff.

Honestly it didn't occur to us that people would object to the game defaulting to checking for updates online, but we do have the option to suppress it (on the settings menu, as I mentioned above). This is the process we've used since AI War released in 2009.

Our only deviation from it was when we released Bionic Dues as only updating (and only distributing) through Steam, because at the time we had no way of doing updates to a Linux installation. That particular decision wasn't very popular with no-DRM folks either :) Which is why we took the time to write our own updater from the ground up for TLF so we could deliver distributor-independent updates to all 3 platforms.

All that said, if this kind of arrangement is simply incompatible with the ideals of the GOG audience, that is certainly something we can bear in mind in the future.

Overall: please be reasonable with us, because we are trying to be reasonable with you.

Best,
Keith LaMothe
Arcen Games.

Maybe you could keep the beta patches on the game updater, and release full patches also as a separate standalone for GOG. That may keep everyone happy.

The message to which I linked said, and I quote:

"I kind of doubt that either have purchased the game..."

If that is not implying piracy, then what is?

I agree with flyingsub, probably no reason to release a standalone GOG patch installer version for each and every daily beta patch, but some major versions. I felt that was the point of this thread: to confirm whether GOG is eventually getting standalone updates as well, on top of the existing, optional, ingame auto-updates. I am also interested into that info.

Just so that there is no misconception, so far I didn't see anyone suggesting that e.g. the autoupdater should be disabled altogether from the game. It is always a nice option.

This is what I want as well. I don't need every small patch to be made as a standalone, but I do expect a roll up stand alone patch every now and then.

I wan't to be able to install and update the game in the future, even if your servers are no longer available. I still play many games that have long ago been abandoned by their studios and I want to be able to play this far in the future, if I desire. That to me is the point of buying a DRM free game.

Thanks for updating us anyway Keith.

Hmm, I tried multiple times yesterday to reply with more info, but it just kept telling me it was still processing, etc. So I'll just answer the biggest point rather than try to answer them all again.

Anyway, we will certainly bear in mind the need to get official updates out through the normal GOG channels. Generally our practice with a new AI War official version has been to replace the standalone installers given to each distributor, and I haven't heard from Chris that we're planning to handle this one any differently :)

Thank you, that's great! The autoupdater offers us the latest patches as soon as possible and once in a while we get a new complete downloader from GOG. That's perfect!

Thanks, thats all I want. Just an eventual way of installing the full game and up to date even if my internet is down/servers no longer available.

Thanks Keith.

Okay, thanks, I will re-download.

Annoyingly the game installs and runs fine under wine on Fedora 20 but the updater doesn't work :(

Trying to work around this now as there's some fairly significant updates from 1.00 to 1.03

Odd, the updater actually uses the Unity engine too (we figured, hey, it's cross-platform right? And we need a cross-platform updater...), so I'd expect both to work or not work.

Nonetheless, I think you can pull this off manually if it's important to you:

1) First, please back up your install, as I can offer no guarantee that this manual process will always result in a working game. If, for example, you only install the latest update but it relied on a previous update you may have a lot of missing art assets or whatever.

2) Grab this file:
http://lastfed.s3.amazonaws.com/TLFUpdatesList.xml

3) Look at that file; it's basically on-line-per-update. Find your current version (or the latest one BEFORE your current version, if you can find it). In your case that's something like:
<update>1001|http://lastfed.s3.amazonaws.com/TLF_1001.zip&lt;/update&amp;gt;

4) Take that url ("http://lastfed.s3.amazonaws.com/TLF_1001.zip", in the example) and download that zip file.

5) unzip it into your game directory. Make sure that it's unzipped at the right level so it doesn't all get put in a subdirectory, or start spraying stuff that's meant for a subdirectory into the main one. I hope you did step 1 :)

6) move to the next line with a still-higher version number, and repeat. Of course feel free to download them all at once and then unzip them, but please unzip them in the proper order (from lowest version number to highest).

It's possible that the latest version already has all the new art/etc changes from the earlier ones, but I can't give any guarantee of that.

Anyway, let me know if that works for you. Basically the above procedure is all the updater does :)