Naked Paul Toast’s Insights

Often on the GMC, people create topics, wanting to know the best way to automatically update the client for their online game.

It’s a tricky problem. An executable, updating itself is problematic, because while the executable is running, it can’t be overwritten. Suggestions are always cumbersome, awkward and problematic. Typically involving the client downloading the executable, then running another executable, which deletes the original executable, renames the new executable and then runs the freshly updated executable.

Variants of this technique, suggest creating a pause to ensure the original executable has completed before it is deleted, sometimes batch files are involved.
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The following topic showed up on the GMC yesterday:

Run A Gm Program As Server On A Real Server, Did someone try ?

I read it this morning, was on my way to work and therefore didn’t have time to post. Later, when I went back to contribute, to my disappointment it was closed.

@CyberTwister:
You should not be running your server program from an interactive session, you should be starting it as a service.

To install your program as a service, use the Instsrv.exe utility available on the Server 2003 Resource Kit.

If you still encounter problems, then check the event viewer for messages as to why the program failed.

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[originally posted on the GMC link]

Browsing through the Novice and Advanced forums, there seems to be a significant number of topics about creating Multi-Player games. It’s not unusual to see 2, 3 or more topics on the first page of each of those forums.

Many of these topics often start with:
“Is it possible to…………” or possibly “How do I get started…………..“. What is painfully obvious is many, probably most, and perhaps all of the topic starters are no where near the skill level required to make what is arguably the toughest type of game using Game Maker.

Of course you can’t possibly tell these budding young developers that they should wait a little before attempting such a project. They get all huffy, start stomping their feet, decrying, “You don’t know anything about me, how do you expect to learn. I’ll show you.” Or something similar anyway.

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