Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Programming => Topic started by: curiousdannii on February 23, 2014, 05:00:22 AM
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Hi, I'm one of the developers of Kerkerkruip (announcements here (http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=2895.0) and here (http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=3351.0)) and for our upcoming version 9 we want to offer installers for the three major desktop OSes. We know how to make installers for Windows and Linux (well for Debian at least), but we're having trouble with OSX.
Our situation is:
- We want to bundle the Gargoyle (https://code.google.com/p/garglk/downloads/list) interpreter with our game files.
- Gargoyle stores data files in the same folder as the game files. We're not in a position to alter Gargoyle's behaviour, so we need a work around so that the data files can be stored in some sort of user folder (so that future upgrades will work, and also to stop the OS from complaining about file permissions.) For Debian we accomplish this through a launch script (https://github.com/i7/kerkerkruip/blob/master/packages/debian/kerkerkruip/kerkerkruip), and we imagine this is a potential solution for OSX too. In the future we would like to use the launch script for other things, and will probably change to Python. Can Python be used in this way in OSX?
- We would like the installer to be as natural for OSX as possible. I don't use OSX, but the others on the Kerkerkruip team who do tell me that normally you just download an app and drag it to the desktop - there isn't actually any install action, it just works. If it's possible to this while also having a launch script great, if it needs to be more like a traditional installer that's okay.
Any advice or expertise will be greatly appreciated! And as an extra incentive, I'm willing to help with my experience for Windows and Debian...
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Majority of applications are packaged into .dmg image (witch is compressed iso) with symbolic link to /Applications/ folder.
You just drag application bundle to /Applications/ folder and that's it.
All frameworks and additional programs are somewhere in the application bundle.
Python, ruby and perl are installed by default in Mac OS X.
You can make startup script that check if game files were copied into users's folders,
and copy them if they aren't or start the game if they are.
Typical location of mutable application data on Mac OS X is
~/Library/Application Support/{App Name}
You can ask google for application bundle structure.
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You should be able to put everything in an Application Bundle (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/corefoundation/conceptual/cfbundles/BundleTypes/BundleTypes.html). I don't know exactly how Gargoyle works, but you should be able to have the executable launched by the bundle be a script that makes Gargoyle launch and open the proper story file.
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Thanks for the links and ideas. Will report back how it goes! :)