UOX3.org

What is the best way to keep updating with the changes to UOX3 but also keep stuff like community spawn, worldfiles, custom js in place?.

Thanks!

First of all - always backup your existing UOX3 folder before updating to newer versions.

Secondly, assuming you're using git to grab the latest changes, I would suggest setting up and maintaining a separate UOX3 folder outside the local git repo, and keep the repo folder itself unchanged so you can always just do a git pull without worrying about overwriting anything.

Then, whenever you have pulled down any new changes, use a diff'ing tool to compare your custom UOX3 setup with the git-updated one (can also be used to compare changes between downloaded all-in-one packages and existing UOX3 setup) and merge any differences into your custom setup. For Windows, I've been using WinMerge for this purpose for over a decade. It highlights any differences between files in two folders and allows one to easily copy those differences between the files if wanted. I'm not sure what are equivalent tools on Linux/macOS, but I'm sure there are!

Another tip would be to always make sure you keep any custom DFN and JS stuff in separate files/subfolders (js/custom, dfndata/items/custom, dfndata/npc/custom, etc) when possible, to make it easier to compare the files and/or back up your custom data. For some files this might not be possible - like the jse_fileassociations.scp, but for those cases I suggest trying to keep the custom and default stuff separated in the file itself, either by position in the file, by using custom ID ranges, or both.

Secondly, assuming you're using git to grab the latest changes, I would suggest setting up and maintaining a separate UOX3 folder outside the local git repo, and keep the repo folder itself unchanged so you can always just do a git pull without worrying about overwriting anything.

Thanks, I will start doing this. Otherwise GitHub Desktop keeps yelling at me about merging and all those things.