[Discussion] Auto-updating the game

[The-Noah]

Right now to update BZFlag you must manually download and install it. This means that many players are running older versions, and never update. Whenever there is a protocol change everyone must manually update their clients and servers. This makes new features being added that are a breaking change take years to get into the game for everyone.

Having some sort of update system would mean that new breaking features could be implemented, and everyone would get them when the update is released. Of course one big issue is the game being cross-platform. Another is servers, meaning when an update would be released everyone would have to wait for servers to update before playing. One solution would be to add a period of time (perhaps a week) of the finalized version for servers to update to, so they are ready to go when the clients released (of course then those servers would be offline before the update, but I'm sure we can figure something out).

It'd be great seeing new features being added with each update and everyone getting them! The development could move forward a lot faster and I think everyone would be happy.

This would be perfect to implement for 2.6 since everyone has to update, then from then on there could be auto updates.

[kmshort]

If this is a general wish-list, then raytracing would be awesome.
Production Vulkan drivers that include the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions are now shipping for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, starting with the AMD Radeon Adrenalin 20.11.3 and NVIDIA R460 drivers for both GeForce and Quadro on Windows and Linux. There are a few tutorials out with the basics of how to.
https://www.khronos.org/blog/ray-tracing-in-vulkan
https://nvpro-samples.github.io/vk_raytracing_tutorial_KHR/

[blast007]

This issue is about an auto-update feature. It is not a general wishlist.

[kmshort]

Apologies @blast007 is there an appropriate thread for this sort of request/wish?

[allejo]

I would just create a separate issue for each new feature request. We don't currently have an official roadmap for 2.6, so we don't have a special unified place for suggesting things. Besides, having separate issues for each feature will allow us to better link PRs to completing features.