Games that I will not rate...

f7f5 on 2013/09/18 21:48

I've found a couple of games that I will not rate because I cannot run them. I mean, there's probably nothing wrong with them and they would run just perfectly on the target platform, but the target platform is not available on my system and at this point I have decided I will not be bothered to install any additional libraries or whatever.

I would still like to leave some feedback so that the authors have a better idea of what is causing other users more difficulties running their, and maybe this kind of information can help them decide what libraries to use or not in the future (or myabe they won't care, or just call me lazy).

So what's the accepted procedure? Should I use the "Failed to run" choice and leave a comment, which has the good side-effect of marking the game as rated in my list, or would that count against them and it would be better to leave a comment on their diary entry?

Thanks

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Comments

richard on 2013/09/19 00:07:

Yes, in the rating page mark it as didn't run. It doesn't count against the entry's score, and you get to leave a comment.

powrtoch on 2013/09/19 09:19:

Out of curiosity, why is it that you cannot run them? Due to missing dependencies on your operating system or because of no executable for your operating system?

reidrac on 2013/09/19 10:27:

I don't know what is f7f5's problem but IIRC at least two entries won't work in Linux, only Mac and Windows, because they're using Bacon game engine that doesn't support Linux. According to the rules this is OK, it's just that you may get less people to play your game.

If you only have a Linux system I guess you could try Wine, but it is less than optimal as it may have issues and you can't tell if it is because of Wine or because of the game.

f7f5 on 2013/09/19 13:07:

Due to missing dependencies. For example requiring Panda3D, and in another case Python 3 + libraries, which I don't have installed in my system.

In general I don't mind installing the dependencies, and I've done it for several entries. But sometimes these dependencies require a bit more effort to build and install, and time is a limited resource which I'd rather spend playing other games than being a sysadmin. [and to make things worse there are games that grab my attention for a long time and make come back and play them again because they are good :)]. I only managed to play and rate 16 out of 40, and I think I will not get to the 50% mark, which I think is a lousy record.

wezu on 2013/09/19 16:23:

I think I'm guilty of using Panda3D, but put up a packed version for all supported platforms (win, mac, linux), just unzip and run - no installing (tho some parts of the engine may be downloaded auto-magically when running for the first time), no dependencies, no nothings. If you like I can also generate a self-contained installer-wizard.  

reidrac on 2013/09/19 17:01:

@wezu: you did a great job packaging, you game was easy to run in Linux. I didn't work in my system, but it wasn't because of the requirements!

f7f5 on 2013/09/20 00:14:

@wezu; I think I had a similar problem as @reidrac running your game, judging from the comments on your diary entry.

But there is nothing wrong with using Panda 3D, or Python 3 or any other library per se.  It's just that some dependencies were as easy to install on my system as "pip install <name>" or "yum install <package>", while others required compilation, installing dependencies by hand, googling error messages .. and at some point I found out that I was lacking time and patience to install the latter :(

I think feedback to the authors could be useful: if it's just me then probably no one will care, but if, say, 10 participants report that they could not run your game because they could not or did not install dependency X, then you have some data that can help decide whether to use X or not in future projects.