Standalone Game Updates?

[hooligan2001]

I have an application/game i am trying to create at the moment, that when release it will be continuly updated. New characters new items and so on. This application will be installed on the users computer and have its own directory full of swfs dynamically loaded into the game. Now instead of making the user download update installers everytime a new character comes out i was wondering how i would go about getting flash to download things like that in a update screen before the game starts. I have seen this in a current flash game called dofus before so im pretty sure its possible. I just cant work out how to make it possible.

Its pretty crucial i work out how to do this now before i make any more progress on the app/game.

Any help or advice would be much appretiated thanks

[hooligan2001]

Anyone have any opinions?

[thehumanchimp]

Can be done, you would probably have to create a seperate app, possibly in VB or C++ - I could help you if you need, I should be able to create an updater for you in VB. You could even run the .swf inside the updater program, so when you run the program, it checks for updates, if there are updates available, downloads them, then starts up the .swf

As far as I know it isn't possible to do this with Flash alone.

[hooligan2001]

Seems like the way i will have to go about it. I have worked with VB and C++ a fair bit but nothing like this beofore. I would like to have a shot at doing this myself. Would you have any source examples in VB that i could take a look at?

[thehumanchimp]

Its pretty easy really:
take a look at socketWrench (http://www.catalyst.com/products/soc...nch/index.html) - they have a freeware edition which is pretty good, it comes with lots of examples like how to get the html of a page, and also an ftp one, so you could combine them together to get it to
1) check the site to see if the most recent version of game is running
2) if not, get list of new files and download using ftp.
3) start game.

To run a flash file inside VB, just go Projects -> Components and select "Shockwave Flash".

Hope that helps.

[hooligan2001]

Ill read over that and see if i can get anything working properly, seems simple enough to use. Thanks for the help.

One more quick question. I know its possible but not sure how to do it but, how to send messages from the swf to the VB file. I want to create sort of a loader swf file as a gui, and to show progress of file transfer.

Thanks again, ow and expect more questions

[thehumanchimp]

don't you mean from the VB to the .~SWF, the VB after all is doing the downloading. I had thought that you could just have some sort of loader screen within the actual VB, and so hadn't thought of getting the VB and the SWF to actually communicate with each other, as it wouldn't be needed.

But if you want a .SWF loader, I suppose one way of getting the VB to communicate with the .SWF would be to write the percent loaded to a .txt file every second or so, and have the .SWF loadVariables the .txt file.Apart from that though, i wouldn't know, sorry about that.

[hooligan2001]

Yeah woops sorry the other way around.

Its cool i worked it out anyway how to get the to communicate directly. Its fairly easy to do and will be very effective.

[thehumanchimp]

so how did you do it then?

[hooligan2001]

Woops sorry,

To send from VB to Flash simple use this

Private Sub Command1_Click()
Call ShockwaveFlash1.SetVariable("myInt", 10)
End Sub

I just used a button as an example. The first parameter is the variable and the second parameter is what you want to set that variable to.

And for flash to send to VB use this

on (press) {
fscommand("sendvalue", "I am a string");
}

And then in VB you need to recieve it

Private Sub ShockwaveFlash1_FSCommand(ByVal command As String, ByVal args _As String)
Text1.Text = args
End Sub

Pretty simple

[thehumanchimp]

cool