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eyyy im new to darkbasic so i know very few things about it

i think i have mastered the hello world program ............ anyone jeolous

anyway on to my question
i have a game idea and i was wondering, if i make a game can i keep upgrading it?

for example if someone downloaded my game, then i fixed a bug or added something on to it, can i send out a patch for it?

Or would they have to download the whole game again?

hehe, that depends intirely on how you program your game/engine! So to say it short, that would have to be you that decides how the game should be updated.

The way it usually works is games use several separate DLL files. It's usually one of them that gets patched the old DLL just gets overwritten. So if you make a game and have other DLL files you've created/used then you could just patch those. But as for the main part of your game, most likely the majority of the code will be created in DB itself and so therefore the users would likely need to download the executable again. But they wouldn't have to redownload any media files.

What Phaelax says applies not only to DLL's, but also data files.

If you write your program correctly, you can have it refer to many external data files rather than compile everything into a single exe file.

That way, updates can be done by allowing users to download patches which are simply replacement data files.

One simple example is having your game levels in a series of text files. Say there are 10 of them.

Instead of your program being written to load 10 levels, write it so it looks to see how many level files there are first. That way, you could easily replace faulty levels or even add another 5 levels - your program would automatically see and use them.

This method could be applied to almost any aspect of your program to a certain degree although actual program code changes would require a new exe to be supplied. That's the one aspect where Phaelax's suggestion is superior because DLL's contain functions which are used by the main program.

TDK_Man