#1 prototype can now be downloaded again!!

Maybe this time it will even run?

After the initial release of my first prototype I was no entirely shocked to find out that the program didn't run.

What I did fix?

To deploy the code I am using InnoSetup which so far I have found to be much more usable than the visual studio alternative.

I installed virtualbox to get a clean install of windows to install the prototype. It didn't run due to missing dlls, dlls that my development computer already had.

The dlls in question were missing as I had switched to a newer compiler, so I was then shipping with old dlls. (I have been coding this engine so long that 3 versions of visual studio have come and gone).

After looking online I found that including these dlls was not a great idea as windows would not be able to update them. Instead it would be better to make the user install the missing files with the microsoft installer. How annoying for the user, I decided I had to make this easier. Innosetup has coding in Pascal and allows you to query the registry to see if the files are already installed on a system, if not you can bundle in the setup and tell it to launch. You can also set a flag to delete the setup after use. Took me a little while as I don't know Pascal.

OpenAL installation is required for sound so did the same thing as above.

After changing the dlls, program complained about not having the old dlls, great. Remembered that I had built the python boost libs with the old compiler, had to recompile boost python with 2015 to get everything to the same 2015 compiled status. Fixed the problem.

Added some more error catching, nothing fancy as I wanted to keep the code simple  while it evolves (hopefully into something that runs on other computers),  nothing is saved on the users desktop and no data is collected of any kind. I just added a msgbox that might pop up and state a code that a user can tell me if it doesn't work.

If you are interested in more info on anything here, leave a comment and I can elaborate or talk code. I may make a blog post on deployment as it is a strange topic that has so many options.

Thanks for reading,

I wonder if it is a game?????

Getting ever closer to something, who knows what...

If you are interested what else I did today, here is a vlog