This is going to be a more technical heavy article, which is really what most of my posts should be about. Anywho, one of my tasks this last week has been to build an installer for our game. Given that we are building the game in Unity, it'd typically be pretty easy, there's a very easy build system built right into the editor. You select the scenes you want, in the proper order, click the button and let it go!
When has that ever worked? I imagine it probably would work pretty well for a normal game, but ours is running three separate programs, two simultaneously to handle all the weird stuff we do. To start, when the game launches, we allow the player to select any mp3 they want. This was a problem in itself because the file dialog box we were using was only available in the editor, so just to build I had to find a workaround for this. Once the file is selected we launch a C++ program we wrote to parse the mp3 and generate the level from it. From there we launch the game in Unity, and PureData, an open source audio engine, since Unity's Fmod wrapper doesn't give us anywhere near the amount of control we needed to manipulate the song in real time.
Because of all these shenanigans, we are constantly referencing song and level data files that are stored outside of Unity. Turns out Unity isn't a fan of that, their system has you throw every asset required for the game into a Resources folder that then gets written to a giant binary file. That won't work for us, so I've been figuring out a work around. When you build a Unity project it creates an exe and a game_data folder which is apparently uses as its working directory. If I copy over our External folder into the game_data, everything is then in the right place. However, several little things have been causing a problem since, such as even though the relative paths are right, I can only seem to get files to successfully open with absolute paths. Additionally, each method we use behaves a little differently, some require forward slashes, while others prefer back.
Once I get all the file reading to work properly in the built version, actually creating the installer should be fairly straightforward. Since this game is going to be Windows only, Visual Studio has a Install Wizard project type I can use. I just have to tell it what folders and files are required for the install and it more or less behaves like every other Windows install wizard you've ever seen. It's pretty fancy stuff.
Hopefully we'll have a working installer we can send out to appease the masses by tomorrow.
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