01 April 2008
| !Warning! XNA RANT !WARNING! |
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| <rant> Since I published Dodge over a week ago I've asked some friends to check it out partly to see if it works, but mostly because like everyone who writes games in XNA I wanted to hear someone say "that was fun." To get people to try it out I put up a zip file with the .EXE and the graphics and sound files so you just unzip it to a temp directory and run the program simple :-) I told a bloke in work that I had finished a game and even after I told him how simple it was and that it was my first and generally played it down as much as I could he still asked where he could get it, I was happy. I told him you can download it from my website he nodded I told him you just need DirectX9c, .NET 2.0 and to install the XNA framework and your good to go and he said "I've lost all interest already...why do I have to download all that?" and I couldn't answer him. Later I got an email from a very good friend saying that he would try out dodge I was over the moon because when I showed him the original he said "it's simple but strangely addictive..." so I was looking forward to hear what he thought of the new one, he replied today and I just wanted to kick him in the nuts, all he could say was... I've tried it out and it works well (apart from one glitch). When you get to final release versions of software is there anyway you can include all the.net stuff etc. in the installer? You can't really expect people to check down a list of support software to see what they need to install....Now if I could write all my software in assembler so that it didn't need anything else to support them I would but I can't so I'm not going to try. XNA still seems to be in the realms of “developer only” stuff, not that it's got bugs in it, but that Microsoft think that only people writing software for XNA will want to see anything written in XNA. Because the people developing in XNA already have everything they need to run XNA there's no need for the redistributable to actually check that your computer has everything it needs to run. If I want someone that is not a developer to run what I have written then it's up to me to build an installer that will do Microsoft’s job for them or I could pay someone for an install packager to make it for me. This in not something that has been upsetting every developer that works with XNA since day one rather every developer has been happy to only show there work to people that have an interest in XNA and don't say "well I can't be bothered to download the support files it's your job to figure out that I don't have them and install them for me" quickly followed with "I hate it when installers put loads of crap on my system that I don't want..." If I really wanted non tech people to download my stuff I would make an installer that would also wipe there bums for them and install Google Bar, Yahoo Bar & a selection of spyware on their systems but as I have only asked people that apparently know what they are doing I don't think I need more than I have done. I know there is the .ccGame thing but you have to have XNA working on your system before you can do that. Microsoft very Kindly tell us exactly which DLL's are required from DX9c for XNA to work and even tell us the Guid's for the different versions of XNA but I just want XNA to be supported in the one click publish feature of Visual studio 2005 or even 2008. I'm not working with XNA because I want to learn how to make installer packages, I want to write Games that other people can play. I can deal with the fact that I need to pay to get it working on an Xbox360 but there needs to be more of an incentive to write for a platform where I know people will download games for a quick play around. If anyone knows of an install packager that will do this that I don't have to spend a week figuring out how to make a distributable copy of my game then let me know, I know you won't but I can ask. </rant> |
posted by Dave Henry at
14:42
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