How necessary/useful is a windows bundle?

akira44 on 2011/04/10 21:03

I've developed my game according to the suggested skellington 2.2 structure, but the command for creating the .exe just doesn't want to work. I'd like to know what's the general consensus in adding the .exe in the final bundle - is it considered a nice detail, or a must? I'd say that everyone here has a working Python environment, so it may not be such a terrible thing to leave it out, but I could be wrong (plus, I'm not really a Windows developer, so I don't even know where to start looking for the source of the problem). What do you guys think? Should I keep trying to fix it, or it's not such a big deal?

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Comments

richard on 2011/04/10 21:56:

I'm probably too late but don't stress about it if it doesn't work. Submitting source should be enough for now.

Cosmologicon on 2011/04/10 22:19:

Yeah lots of people don't make special windows releases. One nice thing about pyweek is you can count on your judges at least having python available. :)

tartley on 2011/04/11 08:25:

Hey. For Pyweek, it isn't strictly necessary, since the other people, even the ones on Windows, will generally have Python installed, and be able and willing to mess about a little bit installing dependencies to get your game to run from source.

But consider this: If ever you might want to send your game, or some other program, to real people - your
your friends, or distributed to the general public - then this is something you're gonna have to figure out one day. If you have any plans to be a professional programmer, then being able to generate an executable people can just doubleclick to run might be considered one axis of a minimum viable skill level. Pyweek is a brilliant excuse to figure all this out, with a horde of willing testers on a variety of different hardware and OS versions, who will all give you feedback if something doesn't work (unlike just ignoring it silently, which is what real users will do.)

You don't have to burn a lot of time during pyweek either - you can practice ahead of time with py2exe or whichever tool you choose, until you've got it down pat. The only tricky part is that you'll have to include the required DLLs, including both the microsoft C runtime (see py2exe tutorial) and any other DLLs that your dependencies use.

The plus side of doing this is that you can send your resulting game to your friends, so they can see what the hell you've been playing at, coding until midnight all week long. :-)

nitrofurano on 2011/04/11 21:46:

for example, i never cared about ms-windows compatibility of my humble pygame stuff, and never will... - some of stuff i code most of the time does system calls to unix-like bash commands which ms-windows can't run them

superjoe on 2011/04/11 22:23:

I dunno if I would be bragging about that, nitro. Supporting multiple platforms is undoubtedly a good thing.

nitrofurano on 2011/04/11 22:55:

of course! :) - but ms-windows isn't (and shouldn't be) the center of the world as well...

tartley on 2011/04/13 08:19:

Hey. I hate windows as much as the next guy, but I It's just the platform with all the users on it. If you don't care about users, then it's fine to deliberately overlook it. But I regard PyWeek as a great arena to practice my skills at bundling for other operating systems, ready for the day when I have to do it for real.

nitrofurano: you could use those shell executables on windows by simply bundling a copy of them with your program, from the GnuWin32 project or whatever it's called.

nitrofurano on 2011/04/13 09:32:

Tartley, i can see a bit of your viewpoint, but 80% (still...) of the users are not exactly 'all the users' - i think it's the same about the IE users, 10 years ago they were 95%, and now they are less than 50%. And since i don't use ms-windows since 5 years ago, and my rare w32 apps using is very limited to Wine compatibility, the risk i have is doing a w32 bundling will simply not work at all... - personally, i neither care about those .pyw files (and i have no idea what about are these for)...

tartley on 2011/04/13 15:36:

Fair enough, nitrofurano, each to their own. Shine on!