[casual_games] .NET and Silverlight

[Tiago Tex Pine]

>

> I'm curious why you would do this instead of a proper .NET installation.



Bundling .NET into your program is a very bad idea.  This forces every user

> of your game to download an extra 10-20 megs of material that they most

> likely do not need.  Please don't do it :-)  Making a proper installer is

> not that hard, also most of the major installer systems offer on-demand

> .NET

> as a standard feature.




The problem is not really make the installer, that's easy. The issues are:

1. Installation time: depending on the CPU, takes a few more _minutes_ to
install .NET, because the installer must run the ngen.exe compiler in a
number of DLLs. One of our tests resulted on an installation time of 10
minutes, on a 1GHz CPU with 256 RAM.

2. The users want the game. Nothing more, nothing less. We don't want to
upset any user, installing software they didn't demand.

3. Xenocode bundles only the DLLs you use. In our case, an extra 10 MB,
instead of the full 20 MB package of .NET 2.0. So, considering download
size, it's better business.
I think downloads for Windows Vista could discard the .NET DLLs. But it is
still not the case for Windows XP... We could think on a webinstaller that
could detect of the user has .NET 2.0, and offer a thinner installation
package - but that would really depend on distribution partners.




> Agreed....  Done poorly, slapping in bits and pieces of .NET could

> possibly

> screw up someone's machine that already has .NET or prevent them from

> performing a proper upgrade (to a newer version of .NET) down the road.




That's a good point. We will test for any problems like that. But on our
first testes, that was not an issue. Apparently, bundling .NET using
Xenocode forces the EXE to run on the bundled DLLs and ignore any other .NET
installation. Also, the installation of the game doesn't require any changes
on Registry keys, system32 DLLs or something alike, that could harm the
machine's OS.





-- 
============
Tiago Tex Pine
tiago at interama.net
texpine at gmail.com

http://www.interama.net
http://warptag.blogspot.com
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