Patching?

[Oafo]

Can anyone point me in a good direction to look for tutorials on patching VB apps? I know I'm going to have to write the program as if it's going to be patched, and that's why I'd like to know how to do this before I get started.

[MartinLiss]

Why do you need the patch the app? Why not just distribute a new exe (as a part of a set of setup files)?

[Oafo]

Because I'm going to start making a 2D game, and I'd like to be able to patch it instead of ship out a huge file everytime one minor change has to be made.

PS: This sort of belonged in the Game Programming forum, but I decided to post it here as it will get answered faster

[MartinLiss]

Do a serach in the forums for patch, but the only way that I know of other than distributing a new exe is to created several dlls that call each other. That way you may only need to distribute one dll.

[Oafo]

I searched for patch earlier but came up empty (no solid answers).

I was hoping that all I'd have to do was put all of my functions, variable declarations, and everything else into 1 dll, and just call the functions from the exe. That way, all I'd have to do was distribute a new dll each time I wanted to patch something, instead of packaging every single file.

[Oafo]

::ahem::

[London75]

Just hypothetically is it possible to write a little program that opens the old and new exe/dll and finds changes (on a hex level) records these as a change map and can overlay them over the file using another little program.

Might not work out better in the long run but it was an interesting idea.

I suppose the entry addresses in the dll would have to remain the same for this to work.

[BodwadUK]

Your EXE shouldnt be too big if you load in pictures at run time

A patch usually contains a more upto date EXE file and any extras that are added not the whole lot you overwrite the original Exe on install an bingo you have your new version

[Leather]

Break the program down into sections and place them in DLL's... When a section changes just redistribute the relevant DLL

[Cander]

There are 2 kinds of patching, one is just ship the replaced files which most people use these days, and the other that you are thinking of is binary patching which is in its on right is hard to do and may not even be possible with VB.

other disadvantages is that it is pretty slow to do binary patching. Not many do binary patching anymore, I have only seen a couple games use this in the past few years.

[Oafo]

Leather said exactly what I'm looking to do. That said, can anybody send me a link or two that gives me an idea on how to set up a DLL and pull functions from it? Thanks.