On 26 March 2010 09:29, James Paige <[email protected]> wrote: > I was thinking about game distribution, and an idea occured to me. We > could have a menu in custom that would allow the game author to easily > prepare their game for distribution. > > The menu could include options like: > > Edit README file > Package in Zip file > Package as Windows installer > > The README editor could just edit a text file. A copy of it could be > stored inside the RPG file. We could provide a generic README template > for people to customize > > "Package as a zip file" would call out to an external zip.exe program > and would bundle your RPG file, a renamed copy of game.exe, a copy of > your README and a copy of LICENSE-binary.txt > > "Package as a Windows installer" would work similarly, except that it > would call out to Innosetup or NSIS or something like that.
I think we should provide more flexibility than that. Assuming innosetup doesn't have a wizard and packages need to be specified using .iss files, we should let people put arbitrary files in the installer, say by creating a directory with the basic template, letting users modify it, and then turning it into a package. > And if TMC's experiments with a Mac OS X binary work out, we could > eventually have a "Package as a Mac App Bundle" too. (Still haven't looked at -gen gcc. Lately I've also been thinking that I would love to continue fbc++, but just don't see myself having the time) > A "Package as a Linux .deb file" option would be plausible too. > > We can't redistribute all the tools necessary to do all this packaging, > but we could certainly detect and use such tools if they were present. > > Any thoughts on this idea? > > --- > James Paige Sounds like a good idea, especially as a way to package a game for other platforms (especially any handheld ports). I suppose we'd want to put together a 'huge' distribution which includes binaries for all supported platforms, or at least make them separately downloadable. Reminds me of a feature I suggested to IM for CP: to add an option to automatically repackage a game with the binaries for a desired platform, or to remove any included binaries if the player doesn't need them. If I knew enough PHP, I guess I would just try and add it to CP myself. Anyway, the point being that this feature is much more effective on the game distribution site or game downloading frontend program. _______________________________________________ Ohrrpgce mailing list [email protected] http://lists.motherhamster.org/listinfo.cgi/ohrrpgce-motherhamster.org
