I was told by a company that better than putting an installer on a CD would be allowing the user to run the demo directly from the CD. Is this even possible when the demo might require things such as the XNA framework to run? Are they actually wrong and an installer is in fact necessary for the dependencies?
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XNA, like many libraries, has dependencies on runtime components that must be in place in order for applications that depend on it to run. While you don't strictly speaking need an installer, the alternative is to ask or expect the user to have the appropriate dependencies installed or install them themselves (which makes for a very poor user experience). You can create an autorun file on your CD which launches your installer. What many games do is have the launcher detect the presence of your game and/or its dependencies and have the installation app tailor itself to what's installed -- presenting install options normally, and if the game is already there, presenting a "launch" option or possibly even launching directly into the game (this may annoy users though). Note that if you elect not to use existing installation solutions (NSIS, Inno, Windows Installer, et cetera) and write your installer shim yourself you have to be careful -- even C and C++ code requires redistributable components, so make sure to ensure the minimum OS level you support already guarantees them or build something that won't depend on them. Once the dependencies are in place, the game itself can be launched from the disc so long as it won't try and write to any relative directories, such as its own .exe directory (a well-behaved Windows application shouldn't do this anyway). Obviously the above applies only to XNA on Windows, as it's the only platform you can execute code off a disc on. |
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