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Hi there guys,

I have developed a few games on Dark GDK over the past few months. They have been remakes of my childhood classics, namely Mortal Kombat and Pong. The former was my first hands on experience with Dark GDK and therefore the game is quiet buggy. Pong on the other hand is well designed, it follows a state design pattern and I am a few steps away from pimping it with some 'not so sophisticated' A.I.

Anyway, I am regressing I want some of my other friends to give these games a shot- the issue is they probably won't go through the fuss of downloading the gdk library and compiling it (i know i wouldn't )

So is there a way to create an installation file for my games? (i want to deploy it on similar windows operating systems.) I am not particularly into windows programming, I hear it requires some winAPI knowledge. But I could be talking complete nonsense here and not be aware of the fact :p, could anyone point me in the right direction please?

Thanks.

As far as I know you could build it in release and include any DLL's that the project might require in your executable's folder. I believe Dark GDK uses DirectX 9.0 so as long as they have that version or higher (which any gamer with dignity will have) it should be fine. I'd test it on another computer first to make sure you've included anything. I don't see any need for a installer.

Please read this thread.

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=180379&b=22



Not quite. They need the August 2007 runtime, or at least parts of it (the directX installer knows what to add and what to leave out). If that's not installed, some DLLs will be missing even if they have a higher version.

The Visual Studio redistributables will be required as well, if it's not already installed on the other machine.

I write again because I've just had an idea for creating an installer, without any Windows programming at all: write a DOS batch file. After all, for a basic installer, e.g. to install your game from a pendrive/CD onto another machine, you only need to do three things:

1. Copy your game files from pendrive/CD to C:, or start a self-extracting archive that will unpack the game files.
2. Start the DirectX installer or web installer.
3. Start the Visual Studio redistributable installer.

Copying files and starting programs can be done from a batch file. It's not so pretty but it will do the job. To be honest I haven't yet used batch files under Vista or Windows 7 but as long as cmd.exe is still part of Windows, they should work.

I also wanted to comment on this sentence of yours: "I am not particularly into windows programming, I hear it requires some winAPI knowledge."

If you believe that all Windows applications are developed with winAPI calls, you are mistaken. That would be a waste of developer effort and time. Since the very beginning of Windows there have been tools designed to save you the trouble of dealing with the API. There is Borland Builder/RAD Studio, Visual Studio .NET, Qt toolkit, Java and probably many others I forget to mention or haven't heard about. You can develop Windows applications for ten years without writing a single API call.

That said, to develop a fancy installer you'd probably need some API knowledge. So you either need to put more work into it or find an installer builder tool that does it for you.

Finally a piece of info that I left out of the thread that I quoted above for you: at the end I mentioned a newsletter in which there was a video about creating an msi installer. That was the October 2010 newsletter. Although the video focuses on Dark Basic Professional games, so I'm not sure if the tool can do everything required to distribute a Dark GDK game, but a free installer tool is worth a try, if you are interested.

That was helpful. Appreciate it. Unfortunately I won't be able to work on the installer for a few more weeks, but I will keep you guys posted if I find an appropriate builder. I have no prior experience with batch files either, I will look up some tutorials though. Thanks again!

Why not use the Inno installer program? I have used it for years (all of the 37 weekly VSTEP Ship Simulator 2008 add-ons in 2009 & 2010 and every one of the add-ons at Creators Forum were created by me using Inno as the installer).

It takes a little while to learn to use it (you program it in PASCAL) but there are so many examples with it, that it should be quite easy. There is also a good support forum.

Thank you for calling our attention to that program, I will try it.

Most Windows installations have a program on there called IExpress, it's a way to package files (in an .exe) and install them.

To simply use it, Go to "Start > Run," type in "iexpress.exe", just go through the wizard, and you'll have a nice little .exe installer file you can send to people to install your games.

That's very useful. Thank you.