Hi Thomas,
In my opinion there are pros and cons to each.
If you decide to go with the installer, you can have it
automatically set up program icons, desktop shortcuts,
dependencies, etc. On the other
hand, you'd need to build an installer for each os.
If you decide that zip is the way to go, I can guarantee
that you'll have people running the game from within the archive.
You'll also have people who don't install any dependencies, and
there won't be any shortcuts for easy access.
I guess in the long run it comes down to what type of
computer user you want to target the game towards. If you decide
that you want it to be newbie-friendly then you pretty much have
to use an installer. If you don't mind newbies having extra
frustrations to deal with, then an archive will work. I
personally would say that it's probably worth the extra time to
create multiple installers, just to insure that everybody gets
an equal experience. I'd also go so far as to say that using an
archive is likely going to give you some headaches as far as
debugging goes; there's no way to be sure where people are going
to put the game's files.
----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Ward <[email protected]
To: Gamers Discussion list <[email protected]
Date sent: Sun, 9 Jun 2013 23:57:04 -0400
Subject: [Audyssey] Thoughts About Game Installations
Hi all,
Over the last couple of months or so I've been busy as a bee
porting
Mysteries of the Ancients etc over to my cross-platform Evolution
engine, and now I am busy writing the documentation for the new
cross-platform beta of Mysteries of the Ancients which I hope to
have
out sometime this summer. However, as I've been porting the code,
testing it on multiple operating systems, etc I need to decide
upon
the method of installation for the game. So here is the deal.
One issue I am experiencing with the cross-platform version of a
game
like Mysteries of the Ancients is that every operating system has
its
own directory structure, its own special place for storing files,
which means I have to constantly change the directory paths for
my
files every time I compile it on a different OS. For example, on
Windows saved games should go in c:\Users\user name\Application
Data\MOTA, but on Linux it would go in /home/user name/.mota. Its
not
difficult to support both, but an easier way is just to keep
everything in a single directory and run it from your home
directory
on Linux or from your User directory on Windows.
There is a similar issue with things like sound and music.
Typically
on Windows a game's sounds and music would be in the same
directory as
the executable like c:\Program Files\Mysteries of the
Ancients\Sounds
or c:\Program Files\Mysteries of the Ancients\Music, but Linux
has a
totally different directory structure where files should go. For
example, the manual would go in /usr/shared/docs/MOTA, the sounds
in
/usr/MOTA/Sounds, the music would go in /usr/MOTA/Music, and the
executable goes in /usr/bin. In short, there is no middle ground
in
terms of where files would go just because they are totally
different.
The easiest solution I can see for this problem is to simply zip
the
game up, and rather than installing it you would extract the
contents
to c:\Users\user name\MOTA on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and
Windows 8
and would unzip them in /home/user name/MOTA on Linux. That way I
can
keep all the files together, not worry about different
environment
variables or different directory paths, and of course not have to
worry about things like User Account Control griping about saving
files to the program directory.
While this method seems to work well for Jeremy Kaldobsky, AKA
Aprone,
I am worried that some users would want an actual installer like
Inno
Setup rather than unzipping and manually installing the program
themselves. I can do that, of course, but I'd prefer not have to
unless it is necessary. Any thoughts, opinions, or suggestions
about
this issue?
Thanks.
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