I want to welcome you to the second part of our interview with PatchLaunch.

Our todays guest is Toolsuite, which unlike Patcher will not be jumping into different dresses for us but will show us well designed dress with interesting details and the location they are living at.
As in our last interview I want to point out that we added a translation for technically oriented readers at the end of the entry.

One of the first things we found out during our interview so far was, that the toolsuite is very capable at teaching the patcher various languages, even able to refresh old knowledge within the glimpse of an eye.
Also, it offers a rich vocabulary for the patcher, covering every situation within which it might find itself.
Lets have a look together at this very aspect of the Toolsuite dress that it uses to teach the patcher this languages:


As we see, the dress is using a simple way of teaching, by showing the patcher the old words and as well as the new words so it learns to replace them intuitively.
Also, this dress is capable of holding an unlimited amount of these teaching sheets which can be replaced by putting an old one in place of the current one.

We also had a chance to take a picture of the wardrobe, where the Toolsuite is deciding about the look of the patchers dresses and how the details are arranged.
The sketching board in the wardrobe is was held simple and intuitive to use from what we saw from our position and we did our best to get a good picture of that before we were requested to leave it again.
We naturally don't intend to keep this photograph a secret, so please have a look yourself:



On the left we see the different possible accessories and also the final size of the dress, while we see the possibility to use makeup at the bottom, together with the positions of the accessory added to the dress.

But we are told that these both are only preparations the Toolsuite is doing on his own, without the need to teach the patcher up to that point. This cought our attention so we asked him how his teaching is actually looking like and were present with a room where saw important information on the track the patcher is meant to sing and in which way it is meant to do so.
We were not distracted by language he has tought the patcher nor the dress, which actually allowed him to focus on the really important thing, teaching the patcher the song.
We were allowed to take a photograph of this room too and want you invite you to enjoy the view we had:



As we see the room is well structured and makes the purpose of the various places obvious.
We also were told that there is a blueprint of the different things we have seen today with explanations by the architect which help to understand the purposes of the various things.

What we also learned when talking with Toolsuite is that he intends to move to a new house in the future, one which has a room large enough to allow him to do the various things we have learned today in one place but with clear separations of the different things. He also has ideas for new tasks which need additional room.
We, especially our photograph, like that idea, as it saves you walking around the house to do the various things.



Welcome all technical interested readers

Today I want to present the PatchLaunch Toolsuite to you. The toolsuite is that part of PatchLaunch that allows you to define the text that the patcher shows during the various steps, that allows you to place the various gadgets in the patcher and skin them with images, previewing the final patcher and last but not least naturally to take your project data and generate data files from it used for patching the project on the enduser machine in a performant and traffic saving way.

First we have shown you the Language Editor of PatchLaunch which is pretty self explaining.
It has the possibility to save the current language to specific filenames to reload them later.
The Patch Creator always will use the default language file, so you do not have to worry that your other language files might interfer with it.

The second thing we have seen is the Interface Editor which allows you to decide which different aspects you want to have in your patcher. It is up to you if you want to use the html view button or the integrated html view, if you want to use the information window, total patching progress, per file patching progress and so on. For those elements you decide that you want to use them, you are then able to define their size and position. The window will give you direct feedback.
If you also use image buttons, you have the possibility to see a preview through using the "Show Actual Window" feature.

The third and last thing we have shown you above is the actual Patch Creator.
Thats the application that you will move into your deployment folder, together with the language and interface configuration and your license key.
As you see the configuration is straight forward. It asks you for the patch domain, the suburl as well as the news url which will be used in the html view in the patcher.
A simple click on create will then create an additional folder for you with all the patch content and data files. The content of that folder then has to be upload to the place you just specified, together with an additional file thats used allow the patcher to recognize that the patching service is available and you are already setup and ready.


We have a list of features that we want to add definitely to the patcher in future versions.
For example we want to simplify the last step by introducing an automatic FTP uploading capability right into the Patch Creator.
Also, as visualized in the interview, we plan to merge the currently seperate tools into a single one. The current design was taken over from the technology that originally formed the root of PatchLaunch, Patch File Creator and decided to keep that look to allow licensees of that technology to move over easier if they upgrade while allowing new users to start with intuitive tools at the same time. Another intend feature, which is related to the editor unification actually, is crossplatform support.
We strongly believe that, while Windows is and will remain the major platform for the majority of users, especially for gamers (and so games), the Linux and especially OSX market are growing and offer Independent Developers interesting new platforms for their applications. We also want to be able to support these developers with our technology.

Today, I start to introduce you to our new comrades, the PatchLaunch duo.

Standing to my left, we see the PatchLaunch Patcher, already jumping into different dresses to pose for our photocameras. But before doing so, I want to point out that we added a translation for technically oriented readers at the end of todays entry.

His first dress is very nature inspired and shows the beauty of skinning:

But the accessories are what really makes the dress shine as we see:

The special thing about these accessories is, as we see thanks to the purposly oversized accessory, that they smoothly blend with the dress, allowing the Patcher meet the requirements for any party.

The Patcher also shows great communication skills, giving him the possibility to express any feel and thought one could come up.
The following two photographs we were able to take show the Patcher how he communicates his knowledge and in addition, we also were able to get a surprise shot of his friend the Interface Editor tutoring him how to do this, even showing him exactly how he has to do it finally:

I hope you enjoyed our little photoshooting as much as we did and will come back soon again to be introduced to the second half of the PatchLaunch duo, the Tools.

Translation for technical oriented readers:

This is the first article on our multi part series PatchLaunch, our upcomming solution for automatic HTTP driven game & application patching and launching the patched product then.
The focus of this article is to show you a few features of the patcher

Above screenshots illustrate a few of the key features in our patcher:

• It has support for graphical skinning of the whole surface, including support for a background skin with optional usage of graphical buttons.
• As the sneak preview shows, the Interface Editor allows you to check the final result without beeing forced to start the patcher thanks to the integrated preview capability.
• The patcher also can be used without any graphically skinning if your application requires that, including the possibility to change the visual appearance through Manifests
• Flexible capabilities: The screenshots also show different parts that can be used but must not be used.
  As an example, the first two shots use the News Button (opens the news view in a distinct window) and the information window.
  The 3rd and 4th screenshot show the newsview as it is integrated in a skinned patcher and no information view.
  The last two screenshots show both, the news view (top) and the information window (bottom), working side a side.
• Various optional capabilities have not been highlighted in above screenshots like the possibility to have the per file update progress, automatic start of the patching patching when the patcher opens and the possibility to play a background track while it is doing its work.
• The patcher keeps local per-file version data which it compares to the data on the server to decide which files it needs to download for patching.
• To optimize the download times and traffic, PatchLaunch supports file compression (optional) which will compress only those files where a size reduction can be achieved.

I hope you liked what you saw so far and will join us soon again when we talk about other aspects PatchLaunch.

If you have any input or question, feel free to drop a us a comment.