What's new

How you find out

There are three ways a new version reaches you, and they all read the same piece of session state, so they never disagree with each other.

• —The UPDATE AVAILABLE card. It opens by itself once per Blender session, the first time you are actually in the iCity 2 workspace. It waits for that workspace rather than firing at startup, so it does not appear while Blender is still loading.
• —The header button. Once an update is known, the iCity Editor header grows a pressed button reading Update followed by the version number.
• —Check for Updates. A button in Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → iCity 2, which asks the server on demand.

The automatic card is offered once and then stops offering itself. Closing it with the X, or pressing Skip, does not lose the update: the header button stays there, pressed, for the rest of the session.

What the card shows

The card is mostly picture. The thumbnail comes from the release, and when that release has a video attached the picture carries a play mark and is itself the link — clicking it opens the video in your browser. If the release has no video the picture is just a picture.

Under it sits the version and its tag, written as iCity 2.0.1 with the tag after a dot separator, and under that the release notes in a scrolling strip. A release published without notes says No notes for this release. rather than showing an empty box.

The zip goes to your Downloads folder if you have one, and to the system temporary folder if you do not. It is never written into the addon folder, because that is the folder being replaced.

Installing the update

iCity 2 cannot update itself in place. The engine loads iCity2Client.dll into the Blender process and Windows will not let a mapped file be replaced underneath it, so an addon that overwrote its own folder would half-copy and leave a broken install. The download is therefore one step and the reinstall is another.

Once the zip is on disk the blue button changes from Update to Uninstall & Restart, and the four manual steps join the notes strip underneath.

Uninstall & Restart does the whole sequence for you: it stops the engine, disables and removes the iCity 2 addon, launches a fresh Blender and quits this one. The new Blender is started before the old one is asked to quit, so a failed launch leaves you with the Blender you were already using. You still have to install the downloaded zip yourself in the new session.

If you would rather do it by hand, these are the steps the card prints, in this order:

1.  Stop the engine (the running engine holds files this update replaces).
2.  Edit > Preferences > Add-ons, find iCity 2 and remove it.
3.  Restart Blender.
4.  Install the downloaded zip from Preferences > Add-ons > Install.

The order is the whole point. The engine has to stop before the removal because the DLL is held open while it runs, and the restart has to come before the install because even a stopped engine can leave the DLL mapped until the process exits. Removing the addon after a restart always succeeds; removing it while the engine is running can leave a half-deleted folder. If removal fails during Uninstall & Restart, it relaunches anyway and says so in the status bar and the console — remove it from Preferences after the restart — which is what you then do in the new session.

Whichever path you take, the install itself is Blender’s own Install from Disk pointed at the zip, exactly as on a first install — see Installing iCity 2. iCity 2 supports Blender 4.5 LTS or 5.2, on Windows only in this development build.

Checking on demand

To ask without waiting for the once-per-session check, open Edit → Preferences → Add-ons, expand iCity 2, and press Check for Updates in the top box. The same box states the version you are running.

1. Press Check for Updates. The press returns immediately; the request runs in the background.
2. If a newer release exists, the update card opens — every time you press it, even if you already skipped the card this session.
3. If not, the reason is written to the status bar for a few seconds and printed to the console.

The reason is specific rather than a blanket “no update”. It is one of these:

Where the release notes are

This manual does not carry a changelog. The notes for a release are written when that release is published and are read back from the server, so there are exactly two places they appear and both are current by construction.

In the addon. The update card shows the notes for the pending release. For the history, open the account button in the iCity Editor header and pick About from the left nav, under LEGAL. The panel names the version you are running, then lists the published releases newest first — one collapsed row per version with its date on the right. Click a row to read its notes; a release that shipped without notes has no chevron and does not expand.

Release notes and the update check both need you to be signed in. When you are not, the About panel says Sign in to see what has shipped. See Signing in.

On the website. Account → Downloads lists every published build with its version, release date, size and channel, the first line of its notes, and a Download button. This is where you go for an older build, or when you want the zip without going through the addon at all.