What is UpdateBuddy?

UB is a tool that allows RagePluginHook plugin developers to easily integrate automatic updates into their addons.

How does it work?

UB is comprised of two parts. First is the launcher. This is a DLL RagePluginHook plugin placed in the GTAV\plugins directory. When loaded by RPH, the DLL launches UpdateBuddy.

UpdateBuddy is the main part of the software. It is a standalone exe file placed in the root GTAV directory. When opened by the RPH-driven launcher, it will follow these steps:

1. Fetch a list of all DLL files in the GTAV, plugins, and plugins\LSPDFR directories.
2. Search each of these DLL files for UpdateBuddy metadata, this will be used to build a list of DLL files that are using UpdateBuddy.
3. For each of the UB DLL files, UpdateBuddy will download its latest version, compare with the embedded version, and determine if an update is available.
4. If an update is available, UpdateBuddy will prompt the user to install or skip it, before moving on to the next identified mod.

How do I integrate UpdateBuddy with my mod?

UpdateBuddy is designed to be very simple and easy to use. The first step is to obtain two persistent links. These are direct-download file links, which do not change over time. My recommendation is Dropbox, as it is both extremely reliable and free for our purposes.

Step 1:

Visit dropbox.com, and either sign-up or log-in to an account. Once there, make a new folder for your mod.

Step 2:

Make a .zip file containing your mod files. When UpdateBuddy downloads your zip, it is going to extract everything directly into the GTAV root directory. To that end, here is an example of the zip used for Armoury.

<aside> 📁 Latest.zip

→ plugins

→ LSPDFR

→ Armoury.dll

</aside>

In this example, I only want the core Armoury dll file to be updated. To that end, in my UpdateBuddy zip I haven’t included any of the mod’s configuration files or other folders.