Custom game / DSB version

[terkio]

About custom games that will have issues with new engine versions.
The ultimate way to get rid of this trouble is to release the games bundled with their current engine version.

A waste of bandwith and space ? Who cares, we all have everything oversized ?

[Saumun]

This is a good idea. I know my own EoC dungeon doesn't work on DSB0.67 (haven't tried it with later versions except 0.68 (which works fine)).
If this is okay with Sophia, I will upload a new one with a suitable version.
DSB is not a large file, so not really an issue.

[Sophia]

Earlier versions of DSB are still available for download so you shouldn't need to upload your own copy.

In general, I'd prefer if people tried to use the newest version of DSB with their dungeons, because then they'll be assured of the most up-to-date an bug-free game. However, I know that certain changes have been made that sometimes break dungeons. So I'd suggest you tried your dungeon with DSB 0.73 first, and only specify it as being specifically for DSB 0.68 (or whatever version) if that doesn't work.

[terkio]

...... to release the games bundled with their current engine version.

I mean: To release a unique file that contains the game and the engine.
This could eventually be with everything taken care, like: An exe that self extracts then installs for a game ready to go.

Whatever the implementation, my point is to avoid in the future the following nightmare scenario:
A gamer has a game that crashes or he gets stuck. Then he suspects this comes from a compatibility issue with DSB versions ( after he struggled with windoze, service packs, dlls, drivers versions ).
Then he struggles with: What is the DSB version the game was made with ?
( There is no explicit way to know this version ).
Hopefully someone knows and tells him, otherwise all he can do is to try randomly through old DSB versions.
Anyway, assuming the gamer has not given up, he will have to restart the game from the begining, whitch is pretty frustrating when this happens late in the game because of a crash or a game mechanism that doesn't work right.
Many have been through this with old RTC games.

[Sophia]

There have been a number of long-standing bugs in the engine that were only found much later, as well as performance improvements that also help older dungeons. A standalone release effectively "freezes" the version of the game in place, which prevents that dungeon from taking advantage of it. Worse, it confuses any potential bug reports because I can no longer take it as given that the user will be using the current version of DSB. Even worse is that a dungeon author may decide that since the release is standalone anyway, they might as well just go ahead and modify the base code... and that makes updating and bug reporting almost impossible.

(As an aside: meadwarrior, if you're reading this, none of this is directed at you, so don't worry!)

To solve the problem you've observed, it'd probably work just as well to note more clearly what version of DSB a dungeon was originally made for. This is also something that's encoded into the dungeon.dsb, so I could make that visible somehow, if this really became a matter of concern.

That said, I should also note that aside from one recent breaking change that has caused a bit of trouble, backward compatibility in DSB has been generally good, so it's probably seemingly more worrisome than it really is.

[meadwarrior]

Thanks for clarifying, Sophia!