How to have an old version and the new version for example, on the same PC?
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Installed via installer? No.
But you can have multiple versions on your pc. You just have to extract the installer using 7zio and then use the app.zip from those extracted files. Note: you will have to disable autoupdates on all copies of the engine as all instances will use the same settings/config.
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what do you call the “installer”?
If I already have an old version installed and I want to try the most recent one without any interferences, can i just download it? You say to unzip it, but is it enough? How to prevent it for replacing the old one?
I don’t know how to describe the installer beyond “the installer”. The exe that installs the application.
And as mentioned, unzipping it is not enough, you have to disable auto-updates entirely from your normal install, otherwise running the older (or newer) version will override whatever you have installed.
Using 7zip to open the installer exe, grabbing the zip from within it, and then extracting that to a folder will let you have a “portable” version of GDevelop that doesn’t install to your registery or your normal install path.
Note that old versions of the engine, as well as running multiple versions of the engine, is completely unsupported (by the devs and by the commmunity as a whole). If you run into issues doing this you are somewhat on your own. However I currently have a nightly release and a prior release as portable versions on my current computer and haven’t had any issues.
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I see others are interested. This is how I did it on my PC. I couldn’t find the zip file so I downloaded the exe file and then extracted it with winRar (or maybe 7zip). Then I do a search on the evil word “update” and send the upate.yml (i think) back to hell. Then I clicked the exe file extracted and when the editor is on I change the folder file for my projects so that the projects from old and new version are not mixed up. If you click file, help you can see there’s an error message on the search for an update. That’s how I did it.
Your process isn’t quite accurate, and could lead people to issues:
- Download the installer of the version you want (from the github, it’ll be an exe like GDevelop-5-Setup-5.4.213.exe)
- Open the downloaded exe using 7zip. You’ll want 7zip specifically as the app folder within the exe is a 7z file. If nothing else, your other zip tool will need to support that format.
- Extract the only zip file within the installer. It will be in the $plugindir folder, and I believe it’s named something like app-64.7z. (This is generally why you’ll want 7zip as it’s a 7zip compressed file)
- The contents of app-64.7z is the GDevelop folder. You can put that wherever you want.
- before launching the other verison, you must disable auto-update in your GDevelop settings for your normal installed version. No matter how much you delete the update yaml elsewhere, autoupdate will redownload it eventually.
Additionally, it is important to note that you cannot have both versions of Gdevelop open at the same time, as your profile settings can only be loaded by one application at a time, so the second instance will default to normal settings. (which includes auto-update on)
it starts to download the new version right away. This is why I erase the update file before clicking the exe file.
I have both version opened right now and both have auto-update disabled… hopefully it continues working
GDevelop doesn’t even support opening the same version twice. So keep in mind that as I mentioned above it will keep attempting to update in this scenario. So long as you’re willing to keep downloading the update file every time, you should be fine.
I strongly recommend against opening two instances of the engine (different version or not) at the same time.