Hosting multiple versions of the game

[p2004a]

Issue tracking infrastructure ability to build and host games from multiple branches in the main game repo to improve the release process.

Right now, only the stable branch is build and pushed. There isn't support for building versions from other branches, e.g. unstable master for the purpose of testing them in the multiplayer settings.

It requires changes across the system.

Dependent issues:

• Allow builing arbitrary rapid tags RapidTools#2
• Adapt update-rapid-repo.sh for building different branches rapid-hosting#3
• Adjust BAR repo deploy script rapid-hosting#4
• Add option in launcher config to select test version stable versions.
• Do something (I have no clue what is missing exactly), to make Chobby work properly with different selected version of the game (use chobby json?, there is overall a bunch of mentions of byar:test in that repo)
• Optional, but might give benefit without requiring below issue: Spin up dedicated game testing cluster.
• Allow game devs to rehost under selected mod name spads_config_bar#196

[wahinuykovitz]

@p2004a From my experience we will need to handle one of 2 ways.
1: Setup config.json for each environment and on build select or rename
2: find and replace on environment variable; select based on tag using a sed/jq command.

The way the push_config GHA workflow is configured it binds to Here which seems to only support a single "Prod" Location.

additionally I suggest a branch config.json where branch equals ${BRANCH_NAME} in the job. I hope this makes sense and happy to create a branch on the ChobbyRepo to see how this may work.

We would need a variable also set maybe on launcher Beyond-All-Reason.exe --BRANCHABC.

[p2004a]

We will definitely not need to support multiple config.json files. No parts of config.json need to be so significantly changed that it would justify entirely separate config file.

The launcher config changes are overall potentially optional: it might be simple to make it work with 2 branches test and stable and that's what is described in the issue above. If we would want many more branches doing it chobby side is simpler. But, this doesn't really matter much for single player anyway, because in single player you can just check out source yourself.

And for completeness launcher config doesn't already matter for multiplayer, because game version is controlled already by lobby room, fetched on demand by chobby, and that's why changes are primarily on the backend.