Installation experience

[minexew]

Hi, I was checking out your thread on Steam forums and I realized how bad the installation experience must be for non-developers.
I could look into producing a more adequate end-user packaging. No NASA-tier technology, but something to get the job done. Would you be interested?

[Nefaro]

Sure. Whatever makes the installation easier
And yes, it's bit complicated, even for myself :/

[Nefaro]

Tried out, all works :) Very exciting

A few things I'd like to still do:

• Load patches from a folder (this means the patches can be published/released without updating the installer)
• Include a UI element to also install mods (this allows for the possibility to distribute a package or a .zip with mods and ask the installer to put them in the right place
• Then I need to figure out how to make a release in Github... and how to package it together (via Github)
• And few minor things (like how to incorporate the installer build number into the app itself)

In future I see 3 types of releases:

• Full (installer + latest patch + mods)
• Patch (latest patch + mods)
• Mod (just all mods)

I will work on all of this in the coming weeks, I'll be having a short vacation and will probably have more time.

[minexew]

I just wanted to note that the original goal was to distribute the installer as a single executable -- it should be possible with .NET to somehow bundle the dependent libraries. That's why I also embedded the patches as resources.

However, when also shipping a bunch of mods, this becomes really inconvenient to build, so it makes sense to just distribute a bunch of files in a ZIP.

Eventually, it should be possible to use some "external" bundler that generates a single executable, transparently extracting everything into a temporary directory before executing InstallerGUI.exe, but it's just nice-to-have, not essential.

[Nefaro]

Yeah, I originally also thought to distribute everything as a single pack... but now I'm thinking, that I personally don't see much need to upgrade the installer that often. Once it works, it should be more or less stable and ideally the mods are those that change, as such distributing them at different times makes more sense.

Then again, this all relies upon someone using it and building new mods etc. That might not even happen ...

[Nefaro]

After having played with the installer a bit more, the mod management is a bit ambitious idea, specially for a first release.
I did add loading patches from a folder (via metadata info file), also added displaying standalone version (at least latest) in the UI.
For me this is already good enough. Also, forgot to mention, I like the banner, it's nice.

In the following days will figure out how to do a .zip based release for the installer and then for the mods and then, this should tear down the huge installation barriers that are present at the moment.

[Nefaro]

I made a release for the first pack: https://github.com/Nefaro/gnoll/releases/tag/full_v1.0.1
And had to fix it already, since I forgot GoG ...

[Nefaro]

Worked a bit on the UI to mitigate the scaling issue.
I have a 2k (1440p) display and got it to work consistently ... more or less. The bottom line doesn't want to play ball.
However made it so, that up to 150% should be fine. Bigger scaling ... has still problems.
Examples of 100% and 150%

The original issue was that the UI was jumping around: it started as scaled but when I clicked on the "Browse ..." button, it re-scaled itself down from 150% to 100%. Spent too much time on this, though I don't think we are much better of than before...

Added the toolbar ico though...

[Nefaro]

welp... after testing it some more... it's not an issue... after proper compile and running from outside of Visual Studio, the 100% one is taken and scaled up... Visual Studio is basically lying to me ...