Generic Game Installer Builder.

[enetheru]

This is purely an idea, I dont have the skills to create the thing myself but i think it would be nice.
Please comment and find al the holes in my idea, or shoot it down. its just an idea and I don't really care what happens.

Generic Game Installer Builder.
Drop an sd7 into folder, edit some text files, compile and wham you have a game installer.
Maps are not targeted by this idea.

Why?
* Because reliance on a lobby to install games is not a great idea. The fact that lobbies help a lot is awesome(none of my friends have actually ever manually downloaded a game).
* It provides new games/mods developers a lower barrier of entry to gamers.
* reduces the distribution of sd7 for games making it easier to start up
* could* provide uninstall functionality

Ideally the game installer would search for spring and download and install it if its not present. that way you don't have to bundle it.

Problems:
* The hard part is searching for spring and downloading it if its not present.
* platform maintenance. such a "easy" system would be nice to have automatic construction of more than just windows, ie a dmg, deb, rpm, whateva.

Actually. CMake/CPack might be able to provide such a system. I might have a look into that.

[AF]

Im sure this has been discussed elsewhere, and I'm sure Zwszg has a solution he can talk about.

Although I would point out that not all games are ready for prime time and an installer might not be best for them or innapropriate. Although anyone that complains they lack a userbase beyond testers really should be making an installer if they expect to get anything out of advertising.

Also relevant quote:

[04:00:06] <UltraDasBruce> Seems like spring engine releases need to be gentler to arrive
[04:00:36] <UltraDasBruce> IE the game sets which engine version to use
[04:01:05] <UltraDasBruce> When valve release a new source engine version they don't force everyone to upgrade instantly and suffer shit breaking everywhere

[koshi]

Drop an sd7 into folder, edit some text files, compile and wham you have a game installer.

http://cgit.springlobby.info/cgit/koshi/installer.git/ been there for a good long while. I'm using it for the Spring1944 installer. It's one script call to update to new engine rev and one to build when game archives are updated. The git archive is probably not up do date tho. I stopped pushing changes to it when it became apparent that no one else was going to/interested in/cba to use it. http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 95#p373595

[enetheru]

Drop an sd7 into folder, edit some text files, compile and wham you have a game installer.

http://cgit.springlobby.info/cgit/koshi/installer.git/ been there for a good long while. I'm using it for the Spring1944 installer. It's one script call to update to new engine rev and one to build when game archives are updated. The git archive is probably not up do date tho. I stopped pushing changes to it when it became apparent that no one else was going to/interested in/cba to use it. http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 95#p373595

Excellent, thanks for the link :)

It looks like CPack also supports nsis. so its possible to write a single CPack script that builds packages for every platform.
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:CPackPackageGenerators

[koshi]

I don't really see that CPack would be of much use here. It seems too limited in functionality.

[enetheru]

I don't really see that CPack would be of much use here. It seems too limited in functionality.

I'm wading through cpack's lack of documentation now so see if it will do what I want.

[enetheru]

It may or may not do what I want, I simply don't care enough to struggle with poorly documented crap for something that was just a thought.

Better that I spend my efforts in more useful places.