Forum ‹ Feedback ‹ Player.IO LiveUpdates?

[Vania]

Reading through mochi's forums I found that the #1 request is for a paid, unbranded LiveUpdates service.

Now this would be useful to all flash developers, not only of multiplayer games,
and is the kind of thing that playerio does.

I think there's a big business opportunity.

[Henrik]

Uhm, we already have it on Player.IO. It's part of any paid plan, just upload your game swf to GameFS, click the file, and download the tiny loader.

[Vania]

Not quite.

LiveUpdates doesnt download the whole game, it patches it to the latest version because it knows the difference beetween versions. This of course saves a lot of traffic.

Using GameFS's tinyLoader is not an option for the common flash developer.
Here's why:
My game MagicPen got 10 million plays in the first month.
The game was just 3 MB.

If I were using GameFS I would have had to pay: (3 x 10 000 000) / 1000 x 0.2 = 6000$
That's about half the sponsorship amount in just one month.

[Henrik]

Ah I see, so you upload the bulk of the game to different game portals so they take the main bandwidth cost, and if you update, you only have to take the cost of the changed bytes. Clever!

[Benjaminsen]

While we do not offer it as a service, it's something the clever flash developer should be able to build on-top of our GameFS system themselves as we allow you 100% control over files.

I do realize that it might be outside the scope of most to setup a diff system and keep track of versions, but it's perfectly possible. I will look into creating an example set of script when I have a half hour of free time. If nothing happens in this thread over the next few weeks, bump it.

[RastaRalle]

bump
such a script would be awsome

[Benjaminsen]

bump
such a script would be awsome

Quick update, I have not had time to look at this yet beyond research.
If you want to give a stab, I suggest you build it around an open source solution such as http://code.google.com/p/xdelta/

Internally you would have the swf embedded as a binary blob, then download a merge file from the server and merging them in memory writing the output to a Loader using load bytes