This is just some brief information at the moment. WIP like mostly everything else here.. :)
- The "RIKlauncher.exe" is the program that launches when you connect from the play page.
- It will only update files in the root folder (where RIK.exe is) and in the Data and Program folders. It will never touch or care about anything in your Player or Level design folders.
- It will check for updates on startup. It does this by fetching the version number from ProjectRIK.com and comparing it to the number saved in "Programs/version". If the version it gets from the website is newer, or file is missing or has invalid content, it will run an update.
- After it launches the game, the launcher itself closes down immediately.
- The update is based on checksum comparison of all files. Your local checksums are saved in "Programs/local". The list of checksums from ProjectRIK.com is saved in "Programs/remote".
- Any problems during the update (most commonly checksum mismatches) will be logged to "Programs/UpdateLog.txt". Simply put, this means the file that was downloaded and saved on your PC isn't 100% the same as it was expected to be. Either because it downloaded and older version via a cached file on a CDN server, or because something went wrong during the download. Checksum errors for non-binary (.dll, .exe) files, can safely be ignored in almost every situation. If you get a checksum error for one of the dll or exe files, the game might not run at all.
- If you manually move your installation folder, you can simply start "RIKlauncher.exe" and it will fix the directories in the registry. If you move the files without re-installing, the connect function from the play page will not work. But simply launching it manually once (without any command line arguments) will make it check if the registry settings match it's current location, and if it doesn't then it fixes them.
- Manually starting RIKlauncher.exe will make it check for updates and then simply start the game without connecting to any servers. When you're connecting from the play page, it passes your auth key together with the server's IP to the game.
Updated May 27, 2015