***Making a Game Launcher***
Hey, Rampage here! This is my first tutorial on the board.
Today we are going to make our own game launcher so that we can load up our built games exe.
This way, if you want to have a game that has both single player and multiplayer games. You can make one of the buttons of the launchers to load up the mulitplayer game.
Ok, so for this little walkthrough, we will be using Visual Basic to make our launcher. I will be using Version 6.0, an old version which is still very effective. You are welcome to use .net or version 8 and up, the code is still basically the same though.
Ok so as I said before I will be using Vb 6.0, so it might be slightly different for you.
Part1:
I am going to asume that you have made and built your fps creator game, and made an install file for it. You can download CLICKTEAMS INSTALL CREATOR HERE:
http://www.clickteam.com/eng/installcreator.php
So go ahead and do that and meet me in part2.
Part2:
Open up Visual Basic and select STANDARD.EXE. This will make it so that you will be designing a program that will comply into a stand-alone exe, which you can make a shortcut for if you want.
So...A form should pop up. You can change the window name and design the look of the form as much as you want (background image etc.) As this is a straight forward tutorial, I won't be showing you how to do this. If you don't know how to do this already, I suggest you look around for tutorials. Its not hard to find out your self though. Go onto popular sites such as youtube for great vb tuts!
Part3:
So, once you have designed your form and such put the following onto the form, all of these can be found in the toolbox to the left<<<<
-1 command buttons (or 1 label, depending on if you want a button to open up game or want to click on text to open it.)
-1 textbox.
Like I said this is a straight forward tutorial so I will only be adding the basic elements to the form. Feel free to put your programming knowledge to the extream!
OK, change the text of text1 to your projects install directory, which should be exactly the same as the one you input in INSTALL CREATOR.
We will use this text box so that if the gamer has installed to a different dectory such as D drive they can change it them selves.
The coding is coming up next in Part4...Just a little though.
Part4:
Double click on text1 to open up coding window.
Put the following code behind it.
If text1.text = ""
then msgbox "Please input the games directory.", vbinformation
endif
So if they text1 doesn't have anything in it, this message will pop up!
Behind the command button, put this code in:
Shell Text1.Text, vbNormalNoFocus
And the name of the games exe.
Well thats it. Make it as awesome as you want to, hopefully you get the basic idea ok?
Now if you want to have a multiplayer button along side the singleplayer button, all you have to do is exactly the same thing, but point it towards the multiplayers exe. Here is a little sample code that can achieve this feet.
Shell ("C:\Program Files\Your name\Game name\multiplayergame.exe")
Simple as that.
Feel free to add anything else such as credit options, if you can code it right control options. Well yea you can make your own options menu. Have fun!
Thank you! Have a good day lol...
[url=]
[/url]The Ultimate Battle Mod, high fps, particles, and more.
