Going back in time to fix a bug

Questions
#1

I released a game on Poki years ago, and I’ve now found a bug in i; all go.animate() animations run super fast when the frame rate is greater than 60.

The game uses the Spine extension, which has since been updated. The new version of Spine is not compatible with the version I used back in the day, so I’d have to redo all the spine stuff for it to work with the present day Defold.

Which leads me to the question; is downloading an old version of Defold (I’d have to find out which one), fixing the issue and building it again an option?

I’m asking because I don’t know if the build server is backwards compatible so far back (say 4 years+).

#2

While the editor and sdk exists (e.g. on github), that build server isn’t running anymore. As a rule, we only support native sdk’s for ~6 months.
I think it’d be awkward to wrestle with, but it should be doable for you to build and run that old server yourself (the code exists on github)

The game uses the Spine extension, which has since been updated. The new version of Spine is not compatible with the version I used back in the day

What version did you use? Are you sure there aren’t any upgrade tools for it?
Iirc, the spine editor can act as a command line tool so that you could read the file and save it again. That would allow for batch updating all the files in one go using a e.g. a python script.
Have you asked on the Spine forum how they generally do this? It can’t be the first time someone asks such a question :thinking:

#3

Hey, okay, that makes sense (and I expected that answer).

Interesting idea, I never considered going back to the Spine peeps to see if there is a way to upgrade old spine files. I assumed the editor would do this if it existed, but maybe there is another way. Cheers!

#4

Another way might be to make a fork of the old spine extension, and then upgrade it to work with the latest engine shanges. Not sure how much work that would be.

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#5

As a side note (for the interested):
This question is interesting as it’s related to our latest build server update, where each docker image is now stored in the public registry, so that they can be used locally by our users.

Going forward, even though we’ll shut down old servers (6 months), we will still keep the images available for a lot longer (depending how many/large they are, it depends on cost).
Still, it allows for users to store them on their own, thus making their builds repeatable for as long as they wish.

However, there’s still the fact that you’ll then miss out on vital updates of platform sdk’s (e.g. iOS requirements to update for newer iOS versions etc, which isn’t uncommon)

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