Feature request: REAL "Offline Mode."

Recently had internet problems for a week. The cable to my internet was cut. In that time, I've been unable to play Zero-K, which would have been a nice distraction.

First, launching took on average 5 minutes. When it did launch, both campaign and skirmish lacked UI, and there were screenfulls of some form of ongoing (what I imagine is) debugging/monitoring text.

In skirmish mode, the commanders never appeared. In campaign mode, I was unable to build, use line-formations, etc. In short, the game was effectively non-functional.

Some things in the game, it appears are very, very dependent on having an internet connection.

My request would be that the game can be played even if I have no internet connection. I'm aware that I would not get the news in the dashboard, could not play online, no access to the forums, could not get updates* and I'm sure there are a few other things.

* (and can we make those updates optional until it's time to play live, too?)


To better understand the nature of my request, may I encourage the devs to try to play with an unplugged modem?


Thank you for listening.

It sounds like you are running a really old version of the game when offline. This is probably a problem with the game knowing which version is the latest in the absence of the internet.

Are you using Steam? I have not heard of this problem on Steam. The steam version has most of its updating handled by Steam, so offline should be seamlessly provided by Steam. I recall it setting the right default version.

If you're not on Steam then we probably don't have the infrastructure development capacity to fix it, given how rare I'd imagine the issue is. See https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Infrastructure/issues/1851 and https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Infrastructure/issues/2647

There is probably some hax you can do to make standalone think it is steam, so not try to update itself, which might help. I can run standalone ZK without it searching for updates because I have a dev version of the menu: https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Zero-K:Developing#Modifying_the_lobby_menu

GoogleFrog's solution is not that bad. All you need to do to stop the game from updating itself is to get the Chobby archive, extract it into a folder (let's call it chobby.sdd, for example) and then run the game with "dev" as an argument. Very easy.