Patch or New File on Upgrade?

[wizardmirth]

I'm getting close to finishing Q2 in the series I'm working on and am happy with both how it's coming out and how my design and script knowledge is evolving. I really enjoy figuring out the most efficient way of doing them, creating the least amount of system impact possible. And believe me, I've sat there and redid things that originally took me an hour or more to do once I realized that there was a more efficient way of doing it. Of course, I'm sure there's still things I could do more efficiently that I haven't realized yet, but for the most part it seems pretty clean to me.

 

Getting to my question, I want to release my quests in installments but I'm not sure if there's a way I can create a patch, say, for Q3 when that's done. Or should I just release a new file that has everything?

 

Of course I could wait to create all quests but it would probably take me another 2-3 months to finish the last two given my time contraints and would like to have what's current playtested and get any bug feedback as I work on following quests. This way I won't repeat any possible mistakes in the future. Modding takes too much time, and being able to do it quickly and efficiently is my main goal. Once this series is done I'm sure I'll know everything I need for quest design and scripting before I'm ready to move on to learning OBSE. This is a project of love, but a learning experience as well.

 

Also, it would be nice if people wouldn't have to clean-save and restart the whole quest over on installing a new file. So long as none of the pervious quest stages change I think it should be alright. I was able to do this when playtesting my mod but noticed there was only a problem when I made changes to quest stages and tried to load from somewhere inside the quest, like with previous journal entries not showing up.