Auto-Update Update

Ryan “icculus” Gordon has surprised us with a cross-platform auto-updater for ioquake3.
Created thanks to contributions to his patreon campaign, here’s how Ryan describes it:

I’ve written an autoupdater for ioquake3, with the intention of the game operating much like Google Chrome…it just stays up to date and you don’t really notice. This has been a long-time wishlist item for the ioq3 team…as they are locked out of platforms like Steam, they’ve been stuck telling people to download the game over and over, maybe migrating their mods, or live without new features and fixes.
Once this solidifies, the official builds will just keep staying up to date, which is pretty sweet. And of course, this is optional, so it won’t interfere with distro packages and such.

We still need to implement the network infrastructure behind the update mechanism, but this is a very important and large first step on that road.
You can browse the code in this pull request and this update that added more security features to the process.
Or read more about the updater in these three blog posts from Ryan:

Please contribute to Ryan’s patreon campaign if you enjoy his work.
If you’d like to support ioquake3 in a roundabout way I am selling t-shirts and hoodies for Nuclear Monster.
ioquake3 is an entirely volunteer-run project and we still need your help, please check out this page on our wiki for more information.