Beta Test / Early Access for RL Updates

[neonrage]

Before going further, I just want to thank all those that work on and contribute to all the various aspects of Rocket Launcher, with no gain for themselves. It is a great piece of software and I really enjoy watching it progress. I appreciate that you have put an update check/installer feature into the program, so that you can be sure everyone is using the same up-to-date versions of scripts and modules when users come ask for help on the forums.

I have one suggestion though. Perhaps you can implement an opt-in option in the RL Updater for those that want to be beta/early testers of new releases. The past two releases have led to numerous issues that have broken various aspects of my setup (as well as many others reporting problems). This results in hours of work fixing things that used to work, on top of the hundreds of hours I have put into building my personal setup. I appreciate the new features, but would like to see them get a more thorough testing before I am asked to update my Rocket Launcher every time I launch it (until I do so). I think that providing the release a few days or weeks before general release to those that volunteer to test would be beneficial.

The developers get a change to test their updates on a broader range of setups, while avoiding the pressure to fix things right away after a release potentially breaks things for everyone. Those that have stable setups can update knowing that the new modules / features have been fully vetted. In the end everyone is happier for it. This type of opt-in beta program has been adopted by so many different software developers such as Steam and I think it is a great idea.

Again, this is just a suggestion to improve the update process. And thanks again to everyone for their contributions.

 

[Ninja2bseen]

Just turn off auto update silly. I think it's in the last tab

 

[agent47]

Just turn off auto update silly. I think it's in the last tab

Just not updating isn't a constructive alternative to proposed beta testing. If everyone followed your advice the devs probably wouldn't be aware of most of the issues in this update. The fact that so many people did upgrade immediately meant that a lot of the bugs were reported very quickly, which in itself shows that a beta testing initiative would likely be successful in alerting them to bugs before the release is pushed to everyone.

This update was a lot more in depth than most of the others because it involved creating a bunch of new classes and functions to make it more OOP based. I believe that a bug in the File class is what caused a majority of the issues and made it seem like so many things were broken since quite a few of the modules implemented functions from that class.

I'm all for a voluntary beta release program as I think it would be a win/win for both the users and devs, but I respect their decision either way. I know this is something they do for free in their spare time, and I'm appreciative of that. So how they spend their RL time is understandably up to them.

 

[neonrage]

Right, I could turn off the automatic updates and just ignore it, but I was just making a suggestion to improve the experience for all the users and developers of RocketLauncher. I was under the impression that suggestions were the point of this sub-forum.

 

[djvj]

Ninja is right in essence that you can turn off updates of you have a solid build, like any other app. You keep it the way you like it and never have to touch it again. But as any other risk vs reward scenario, you lose support and chance at new features as they come out. Again like any other app.

We already have a beta forum just haven't used it since we released RL. In order to take advantage of something like that, rlui would need to support beta build and I might have to push an alternate git for it to pull from or mark certain builds as releases for public vs beta. Brolly would have to let me know which would work better, probably the latter.

We have some other ideas on this topic we are going to implement soon, just have to work out some of the other details.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

 

[brolly]

We already have support for beta builds in the updater djvj, we just never really tested it live. We simply need to start tagging the releases on git, no need for an alternate repository.
Of course something like this would only work if users were actually active on beta testing which on most of our beta testing initiatives didn't really happen, because if people stop updating because they see it's a beta version that's available and prefer to wait for the stable release it won't really do us any good.

That being said as djvj mentioned we are working on some other stuff that will allow us to run some automated tests that should hopefully decrease the amount of bugs that still pass on to production builds.

 

[Ninja2bseen]

Thanks for knowing what I meant djvj. I was probably one of the first to update [emoji13] you guys are doing an amazing job even with some of the negativity you all receive especially when you do it for free but still act like its ur job. Thanks on behalf of everyone here and please keep on supporting us

 

[aorin1]

I believe this thread has to do with what I missed regarding the auto updates feature RL.
Rocket Launcher, and I said it when it was first released, is a milestone for everyone and I love it, it made our lives so much easier compared to HyperLauncher.

I noticed that when I remove my undesired error sounds, like when I have an error when some error occur while launching a game, the auto-updater forces me to get those mp3 files again, so I was wondering if it's possible to categorize what we want to update, like check boxes or something like that, because I tend to update every time RL tells me to, but I don't want the error sounds or any other media I don't want back, I always focus on modules and the app itself while I update it, because I believe that updates for these are essential.

 

[brolly]

If you don't want the error sounds you disable that setting through RLUI you don't go and delete the actual files. Partial updates will never be supported because it would make it possible for users to only update some libraries/modules and not others and would make our life miserable trying to figure out any reported issues because users would be able to be running any sort of library combinations.

 

[aorin1]

If you don't want the error sounds you disable that setting through RLUI you don't go and delete the actual files. Partial updates will never be supported because it would make it possible for users to only update some libraries/modules and not others and would make our life miserable trying to figure out any reported issues because users would be able to be running any sort of library combinations.

I never noticed that sound option until you mention it, thanks, it solved the annoying sounds.
I understand that is important for you that everyone has the same modules, updated to the latest versions so you can all track all issues and solve it to everyone in on time.

Thanks again.

 

[aorin1]

I disabled the sound but it doesn't seem to disable error sounds, like when you try launching a game and the module returns an error, these sounds are anything but annoying, and shouldn't exist in the first place, why are something annoying like this enabled?
If I delete the mp3 sounds, the updater will tell me I need to redownload them again, but I can't choose to update modules or the program itself without having to bother deleting them forever, it's really unneeded, I mean, these noises.

 

[brolly]

What's annoying for you isn't annoying for others. Seems there's only an option to disable the progress sounds, but a new setting for this can easily be added.

 

[aorin1]

What's annoying for you isn't annoying for others. Seems there's only an option to disable the progress sounds, but a new setting for this can easily be added.

Yeah, it seems that it's only me who bothers about it, actually, sometimes the speakers are loud, but I forget the volume is high, and it's really annoying listening to that failure sounds in these cases.
Thanks for your support and fast response.