Packaging a Construct game.

Every time I send my friends a .zip containing my game's .exe and all, there's like a 90% chance they'll get some error that prevents the game from running, or the graphics/display will be completely messed up and glitchy. This was a huge problem when I released the Minitroid demo; apparently we linked people to the wrong DirectX and some .dll was missing or something and yeah. It was pretty bad.

To my knowledge this is due to them not having the "right" DirectX installed, which might contain a certain .dll or something, or their video drivers or w/e are outdated.

Can anyone tell me exactly what I need to tell people to install in order to get my games to run without any problems? Links would be appreciated as well.

Thanks.

This works when I'm installing on other machines. However, it requires an internet connection, so if you want the (larger) offline setup you can get it here.

"This download provides the DirectX end-user redistributable that developers can include with their product."

Size: 95mb

LOL hm. I think I'll go with the first one :)

Well thanks for the link I'll see if this works.

Also, I sent my friend a DB link to my game's .zip but he got this error:

traduction: " windows can not access to the device, the path or exe, or specified file. You may not have appropriate permissions to access the item."

Sounds to me like an error you would get from trying to open a file that hasn't finished downloading, or opening a shortcut to a file that no longer exists. Any ideas why he'd get that? No one else has gotten that error so far..

Hmm, might be that the file isn't in the Public folder of Dropbox... Or your friend needs to be running an administrator user account.

He said it was something with his anti-virus. However, his anti-virus didn't warn him about it; he just got an error like it was a problem with the game. sigh.

In other news, I sent the .zip to my brother and he's also getting a crash. "Unexpected error" blah blah. I still don't get it. I sent him the exact same .zip that ran perfectly fine for me. My other games work on his computer as well.

I get the feeling this is going to be happening to a lot of people. Kinda freaking out here.

edit: deleted all the events at the title screen and it worked for him. This means the crash is due to the input system plugin or spritefont. Buuuuuut again, it still works fine for me. ugh.

There may be .dll's you have on your machine that they don't. See if an install of CC with the plugins makes it work for your brother.

Still doesn't work for him. I installed the DirectX you linked me to on his computer, installed Construct + all of the plugins I used, and turned off all of his anti-virus stuff.

The only thing that gets it to run is deleting the event sheet for the title screen, which uses the input system plugin and the spritefont plugin. I don't see why, as again, the game still runs for me and some other people I sent it to.

Are you able to isolate which plugin? Input system or spritefont? Or is it both?

It's the spritefont plugin. Removed it from the title screen completely and it worked for him.

Unfortunately this is a plugin I really need, and if it's only causing problems on his PC then it has to be something else..but what?

edit: Aha. "Set characters by string" is what was causing the crash for him. I thought that was fixed <img src="smileys/smiley5.gif" border="0" align="middle" />