thezoc/zpatcher

A suite to Create and Apply patches to application and games.

🩹 ZPatcher Lib

The ZPatcher library provides a set of utilities to easily update applications and games using patch files.

It compares the contents of two different versions of the target software and creates a file with all the changes between these two versions. This file can be then distributed to users to update their copy of the software without needing to redownload the entire package.

An experienced developer can also add support to seamless update their software by adding the library to it.

💻 ZPatcher Suite

This repository also inclues a fully featured standalone implementation for the ZPatcher lib!

Features:

• Multiplatform, currently supporting Windows, OSX and Linux.
• Open Source
• Easy to Create patch files for your game/application
• Skinnable
• Command line tools available to be easily included in deployment scripts
• Client-Side automatic Download-and-Apply patching process
• File backup when applying a patch, reducing the chances of a broken build on clients
• (Launcher Only) Display the Change Log for your patches

🚀 ZLauncher quick start guide: ZLauncherQuickStartGuide.md

📖 ZPatcher Suite user guide: ZPatcherSuiteApplications.md

⚙️ Compiling

The application can be compiled in Windows, macOS and Linux with a few simple steps. Check Compiling.md for instructions on how to compile the for your target platform.

🖋️ Future features

While the application is stable and mature, there is always room from improvement. A few features are planned, but not yet implemented:

• Add hash check of the files to be updated by a patch.
• Add support for binary file deltas. Currently considering using minibsdiff, but suggestions are welcome.
• Patch merger (i.e. Given two incremental patch files, merge them in a single patch file).

Please note these features are not listed in order of priority. Also, there isn't a timeframe for those features to be added.

Pull requests are very much welcome!

📑 Third Party libraries

ZPatcher uses a few external libraries to aid in it's functions:

• libcurl
• LZMA SDK 21.07 provides the LZMA2 compression algorithm.
• Dirent interface for Windows for directory navigation under Windows
• RapidXML for XML parsing
• MD5 implementation by L. Peter Deutsch

CreatePatch and ApplyPatch uses ZPatcherLib, which uses LZMA SDK and Dirent.

ZUpdater also uses libcurl and RapidXML.

📌 Final Considerations

It is my desire to keep this project as a cross-platform lib and application. If you attempting to compile it for a new platform and run into issues and/or have a fix for it, please, don't hesitate to open a new Issue or Pull Request!

Contributions to the project are welcome! Get in touch if you want to contribute and be sure to send pull requests!

Last but not least, I'm not sure how to properly give credit to libraries used in this project. If it's done in a wrong way, I'd certainly appreciate some help on how to format and give credit in an appropriate way. :)

zpatcher's Issues

Problems with Visual Studio 2017 retargeting

Hello I've this when I compile the project. I downloaded tinyxml2 as curl or dirent but the tinyxml2.lib is missing. The problem is with this code : #include "tinyxml2.h".
Help would be appreciated.
Thanks for advance

Links on Patchnotes

Links from the change log are opened in the launcher, not in the browser.

Up to date message on startup

Zpatcher has been working great for me for my project for the past few months. However, on my most recent patch something broke. New users downloading for the first time get the "up to date" message on startup, with no downloading or patching at all. But, users who were at the previous version were able to patch successfully. What could be causing this?

std::bad_alloc crash for certain windows users.

This might be way too vague for the issues system, but this seems like the only point of contact so I went for it.

• When updating via ZLauncher to a specific patch users get a popup reading "*** Caught unhandled unknown exception; terminating" and the launcher just stays on "Applying Patch, Please Wait..." (still functional enough to complain about closing it while applying a patch)
• Not everyone gets the error: works fine on 5 different computers, but another 4 computers have the crash. Only obvious common point is that most of the users who crash are on Windows 7, while those who it works for tend to be 8 or 10. One win10 computer still has the crash, though. Works fine for me personally, and I don't have direct access to the computers having issues.
• Was compiled on 8.1 using Visual Studio 2015 with x64.
• Using wxWidget's OnUnhandledException() override I was able to find that it's getting a std::bad_alloc exception, but I can't get a full stack trace out of it using wxWidget's debugrpt tools: OnFatalException() doesn't get called from it, and doing the reporting in OnUnhandledException() or OnExceptionInMainLoop() just gets the stack for current error handling rather than what threw it.
• Trying again (after restoring the backups) or performing the patch process from scratch results in the same error consistently for users.
• The ZLauncher log file ends on "Writing File: ./py/map/state/new_round.py" (part of a replace operation). There was only one more file it needed to perform a replace operation on (py/network/sanitize.py). It seems to write the new version of the new_round.py file correctly before crashing.
• Nothing exceptional about the patch: it's quite small, only changes less than 20 files, and doesn't involve updating the patcher itself. There are only about 12 total patches in the configuration currently.
• This is all using the current version of ZPatcher (as of this posting) with minimal modifications. Patches were created with the command line tool.

The relevant patch files can be provided if necessary, but I'd prefer to do so privately.

abandoned?

Could you make ftp support please?

wxprec.h

I get
"4>c:\users\reck\desktop\zpatcher-master\visualcreatepatch\stdafx.h(9): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'wx/wxprec.h': No such file or directory"
whenever I attempt to compile.

I'm trying to compile with VS2015

setup-external-dependencies.ps1 doesn't work

Hello I just wanted to tell you that this powershell file doesn't work for me but it's not a problem I did manually everything you coded in this file. I put an image (sorry it's writen in french)

Linux and OS X Support

Pending Makefile to support Linux versions of VisualCreatePatch and ZLauncher.

Patches limited?

basepatch works, first update works too, second and more updates are not working.
single patch not working, only together with first update
after the first update always the message "up-to-date".
zpatcher.zversion only contains blank characters?

is there a solution to delete the temporal downloads in the directory updates?
The downloaded server-side xml should also be deleted

Update Readme.MD

The information is outdated, it needs to be updated.

Directory problem

Branch: Version3
Environment: Windows10 VS2019 latest

This is likely a configuration issue with VS, but I have not been able to figure this out, and I expect others will experience a similar problem, so I hope you can help to resolve this one.

Installing all prerequisites manually worked fine.
Retarget projects to latest worked fine.

Building results in a malformed directory on all projects, and the following error:

Error MSB3191 Unable to create directory "C:\ue_projects\ZPatcher\ZPatcherLib\C:\ue_projects\ZPatcher_Intermediate\x64\Debug\ZPatcherLib". The given path's format is not supported. ZPatcherLib C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\Microsoft\VC\v160\Microsoft.CppBuild.targets 998

Note the duplicate C:\ue_projects\ZPatcher\ in the path.

Do you happen to have any suggestions on how to fix the directory location?