Difference between revisions of "Installation Instructions"

Revision as of 14:08, 20 April 2006

Installing Darwinbots is usually quite easy. Occassionally, the programmers will make a mess of things, making new installations more difficult.

New Installations

For a completely new installation it is necessary to download version 2.1 and run the setup file before upgrading to later versions.
This will set up all of the necessary directories and install the program. It will also add a number of activeX files to the Windows\system32 directory.

The download is available at the current Downloads or you can also try the old FTP.

Upgrading

The Darwinbots community is quite active, and major releases are made public generally every month. Each new version contains substantial improvements. Don't cheat your Darwinbots experience! Be sure to have the latest version installed.

Upgrading Darwinbots is quite easy, as all you need is the new sysvars file and executable. New patches are listed on the FTP and Wiki FTP in chronological order, so newer releases are generally listed last for a section. Each release comes with a code archive and patch, downloadable seperately.

Newer releases are, obviously, of higher numbers. Thus 2.36 comes after 2.35 but before 2.4.

Note that the old FTP is no longer updated.

After downloading the zip of the new version, unzip it to your Darwinbots folder. (typically C:\Program Files\DarwinBotsII) Yes, you must do this manually. The developers are far too busy with real programming to figure out how to implement an autopatcher.

When you unzip your new version of DarwinBots, "sysvars2.21.txt" will automatically overwrite the existing version if you have one. This is okay since the sysvars files are backward compatible.

Final Note

New versions almost always have bugs. The first week or so after a new release is filled with the programmers releasing minor updates almost daily. These updates are noted by the suffix numbers of the version. Thus, 2.37.0 was the initial release of 2.37 2.37.4 is the 4th bug fix version released.

We know it's a pain to download a new patch almost every day. But it's only through community bug testing that the bugs can be isolated at all.

Anything with the same first 3 digits (that is, all versions of 2.XX) have the same features and differ only in minor bug fixing.

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