Hello everyone,

Just last night I finalized an .exe file for a simple windows app which was just meant to demonstrate some of the work I'd done so far in learning SDL. I got everything working on my machine, and put it all into a .zip folder and loaded it up to mediafire so I could share it on my blog. I thought everything was fine, but then my mom downloaded it and it came up with the error "libfreetype-6.dll could not be found" etc etc.

Now, I know how to sort of directly fix the problem. I should be able to just pack in the libfreetype-6.dll into the zip file and that error would be resolved. But where can I find documentation on why this is happening in the first place? I never had anything reference that dll that I know of, unless one of the SDL libraries uses it. It seems to have been something that was just on my computer, but is not on my mom's.

Is there some documentation I could read to sort of foresee these things? Because I can just imagine having to like... pack all of my computer's dll's into a zip just to get a stupid game to work or something, because I imagine that if this happens with a small app like this it will happen 10 fold with an actual project.

For the record I made the app on Windows 7 using MS Visual C++ Express 2010, I have the SDL, SDL Image, SDL Mixer, and SDL TTF libraries referenced, and the program seems not to work on a Windows Vista computer.

You can download what I got here: Download

There's a readme file that sort of explains everything I did, but if you need to see actual code or anything let me know. Like, is this something you can only solve through rigorous beta testing, or can some of this be prevented? Also, let me know if you get any different errors.

Thanks,