Will, first off I think it's wonderful that you're thinking so much of distribution. When it comes to the majorty of the downloadable game audience (the less technical part) I think having reasonable end-user distribution is a pre-requisite to the success of any game generation tool chain. To put another way, if a good distribution option was not there for tool x, distribution would have a signficantly increased failure rate, and the majority of game developers in the world would take tool x off of their list.
However with your idea of a Pygame Runtime, I honestly think it would be a large step backwards, at least for the Mac and Win markets. The big reason why I say that is because the number one issue for distribution to be successful to the mass downloadable market is that when they find and run your link, it all just works. Basically most people will not put any work at all into figuring out why they can't run what they downloaded. They'll just go find and play one of the thousands of games that do just work. Also no distribution channel for downloadable games will take a game for inclusion if it doesn't just work for the vast majority of users. If there is a dependency that is required and not included - any at all - then it won't work for people without the dependency. And a runtime (that is not included) is a dependency. Also, when mentioning py2exe you said it "will generate a large bundle of files - and then you are left with the tedious task of making an installer.". I can see how those might look like a negative at first glance (having lots of files then writing an installer) - but in terms of the final output of that process, it's very well suited to the windows downloadable market. The market is well established with end-users knowing how to: a) download and run something b) launch a program from the start menu or desktop. The installer gives you a single file to run that installs start menu shortcuts. It's all set. What the contents of the install directory look like is basically irrelevant. Also writing and building an installer is actually really easy (easier than py2exe in my opinion), and is so short and simple it doesn't have time to be tedious. It's usually just filling out a little script file (like 10 or so lines) Inno Setup is really awesome for windows installers: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php ... all that being said, the one way I can see the runtime idea really working, is if the runtime was also a game browsing and downloading client, and then the download link for a game in that system was basically just the client. WildTangent and Steam are basically like this. I still would perfer distributing installers myself (I like that it would be more open) but I would be interested in submiting content into a system like that, and I can see it being successful. On 5/6/07, Will McGugan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just posted an entry about a suggested 'PyGame Runtime'. I'd love to hear the opinion of the PyGame community on this one! http://www.willmcgugan.com/2007/05/06/pygame-runtime/
