Hi guys,
I'm making a very simple game with VS2010 and SDL. Now, if I wanted to send the file to friends/family without SDL & VS2010, would it be very difficult? Would they have to have VS2010 on their computer and I include the SDL binaries in the folder?
This is probably a very simple question, but I never really understood how it works.
Hi,
Each PC with Windows in recent years comes with .NET Framework either shipped with the system or upgraded and updated when the OS is upgraded and updated. Even if they have an older .NET Framework version, your game should run just fine in their computers. We are currently making games in the latest .NET Framework 4.5 or even 5.0, but everything runs and can be developed for 4.0 and run just fine in the future versions. Microsoft does a fine job of making .NET implemented programs be backwards and forwards compatible.
There are ways of making the .NET implemented programs work in Macs and so forth, but I don't use them so you would have to research and ask about them.
Take a look at Mono, which might work for you in the future to have more platform flexibility in targeting systems.
If it's developed with Visual Studio, Compile it within release mode and send them your "Release" folder. You should also include your Visual Studio library installer (Extremely simple, it is a .exe that you can get from Microsoft's website that will automatically install everything you need.) As long as you include the SDL files in the "Release" folder those should work fine also. I recommend a "Readme.txt" or something of the like (Maybe "tutorial.txt" or "install.txt") that explains to them everything they must do so your game will work. I hope this works out, Cheers :)!
I would try to find a setting in VS that makes your executable backwards compatible with older versions of windows - to eliminate the need for end-users to download and install any external stuff (regardless of what version of windows they are on).. I'm not sure if there is such a thing, but I think it would be pretty ignorant on Microsoft's part to not include an option for developers to make their programs compatible with a larger number of end-users' machines. Then again, Microsoft does want to eradicate all legacy support and increase its stranglehold on EVERYTHING, from what I can tell.
Personally, I use MinGW Developer Studio, which is a discontinued IDE for the MinGW compiler. It simplifies everything and allows me to produce native win32 exe's that run on any version of windows from 95 to 8 (depending on what features I implement). It's like a less-buggy version of DevC++, that includes code folding (yay).
As for the SDL situation, you will always be required to package the SDL dlls with your program, that's just the nature of SDL, and for some, a motivating factor to develop native win32 apps (I settle for distributing the DLLs with my programs).
Hi everyone,
I don't plan on making this program mac-compatible, as I know that would add more to the process.
I'm planning on sharing it with a few people and they have Windows XP and above; taking in what you guys have said, I imagine that this will be simpler than I thought.
Thanks for the help!
