Hello PA Forums! Long time, no see! Recently, I fiddling about with the old minecraft.jars in minecraft backdater, and I began to wonder if the same was possible with PA as well. Is there a way to backdate your PA to play on older Gamma, Beta, or Alpha builds? I'd love to be able to see and play PA like when I first bought it, all those years ago. It would be a huge nostalgia trip. So, is there a way to pull this off?
Even if someone has been keeping copies of the old files, nothing from before offline play was released would work. The earlier builds all needed to connect to Uber's servers running the same version of the game, and those get updated when new patches come out.
Before the server was released: No can do. After: If you have the version handy yes. But unless you kept them backupped somewhere you don't.
Well, that sucks. Perhaps there could be a way to make a mod that re-enables or replicates the features from those old builds, in doing so creating a similar experience.
Eh..... that would take an enormous amount of work simply because the only way I see someone could go about doing that would be to dig through forum posts that are years old and compile scraps of information from dozens of those.
Hmmmm... That's worth checking out. I wonder how much of the older game builds is still left in the current game, and how much could be altered to restore older elements...
At best you could give it something close to the old balance but with the current game code/mechanics. There are a lot of things that wouldn't work the same way as before if you tried this.
This could somewhat be done afaik. Online, nope. Lan, yes. You would have to have the entire build, not just the units jsons, on the older ones. Alternatively, with some text-file sorcery, you could apply important values (weapon target layers, health, speed, travel layer, damage, rof) from older versions to newer versions. Text-sorcery isn't that hard, scripts in python or windows powershell via ruby can do it, but you have to actually know how to script an automated script to read values from 1 file and transfer them to another.
I have visions of anyone at Uber who has the misfortune of reading this ridiculous post face-palming hard.
The question isn't so much "Why would you want to" but more "Why would you think Uber would help you even if you could?"
I might be able to retrieve old builds if I had their update server's URL. I can do it for other games - open a REST client and input a request.
