Adding game options after release

[chriskang]

The wiki says that adding options after release may break current games and I'm trying to understand why.
Is it just because the call to getGameStateValue may fail ? In this case couldn't I just encapsulate it in a "try" block and have a default behavior for old games in the "catch" ?
Or is there something trickier in the database or in the server state that might break ?

[paramesis]

getGameStateValue wouldn't throw an exception, it would just return 0. Note that this value would not actually exist in the "global" table.

Introducing options can present a problem if your code is expecting a value from this function that isn't 0, or you've made other changes that would be incompatible.

[vincentt]

Also, check with admins if there is an Arena season on it, some changes in setup may be needed.

Vincent