Pack your game with a working installer

[RuneDragoon]

Unreal Tournament 3 has one hell of a faulty installer. I think I have spent 4 hours trying to work my way through the special Olympics of a game installer, with no solution in sight that actually has worked. Seriously... if you ship a game, make sure that your users are not pulling their hair and their faces off trying to install your game.

[Steelclaw]

Games shouldn't need their own installer to begin with.

"Unzip this file to a directory of your liking and run the executable to play. Drop a shortcut on your desktop or start menu if you want."

This makes the game portable and not tied to a specific installation directory, windows user profile, or windows installation. Wherever it is, it will just work. (hint.. hint..)

Plus, uninstalling is a breeze -- delete the directory, remove the shortcut you optionally created. Done!

[gopher65]

I remember when I bought the final expansion for Civilization 3. I ended up having to manually install it and fiddle with regedit. I was not happy. I agree with SC. I don't understand why there are so many files scattered all over the place! Just plop them all down in one directory and be done with it.

There is a game called "Operation: Inner Space". If I recall correctly it was the first game that was coded specifically for Windows, as opposed to being a dos game that could run in the windows shell. It installs itself this way, and you know what? It runs in any version of Windows with any service pack with no changes to the program.

Wouldn't it be great if all game makers did that?

[RuneDragoon]

Games shouldn't need their own installer to begin with.

"Unzip this file to a directory of your liking and run the executable to play. Drop a shortcut on your desktop or start menu if you want."

This makes the game portable and not tied to a specific installation directory, windows user profile, or windows installation. Wherever it is, it will just work. (hint.. hint..)

Plus, uninstalling is a breeze -- delete the directory, remove the shortcut you optionally created. Done!

Thats another nice thing.. when there is no installer required. No registry mess or anything. Just drag and drop.

[Greenclaw1]

Trust me UT3 is not worth the fuss. It's simply more of the same with more eye candy. It doesn't do anything to advance gameplay in fun and interesting ways in the Unreal series. You'll get far more hours fun playing Battlefield 2.

[RuneDragoon]

Afraid however, that I am required by my instructor to use it for the homework.

I did manage to get it working though... after much blood, sweat, and tears. Mostly sweat.