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[astrospoon]

On the surface, XNA seems really great. But while it is VERY COOL to be able to publish on XBLIG, I have heard nightmares about running/installing XNA games on PC. Tons of extra required junk needs to be installed or something.

Has this been rectified at all recently? Or is it still pretty terrible trying to distribute PC XNA games?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

blueberry garden was xna and did okay; braid is also xna.

[team_q]

I didn't think Braid was XNA, I thought the major thrust of it's development was done before XNA really got off the ground.

[astrospoon]

I can confirm that Braid was not XNA. Jon refuted this in the comments on his blog recently. But seriously, anyone working on XNA wanna give the specifics on the required installs and if this has been made transparent to the user yet?

[team_q]

You need .net and the XNA runtime to run XNA games on your PC.

[astrospoon]

Right- but is there an easy way to include that with your game download so that say.... even my mom could install it and get it working? (ie: download install program, double click, install happens, program works; instead of: download install program, get error, google error, search for missing runtimes, install runtimes, retry installing game, etc..)

[Snakey]

You can bundle everything in your own installer.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

ah, didn't know that about braid, thanks

still, i had no problem installing blueberry garden

apparently that game runs slow for some people, but i didn't have that problem

[mewse]

I had severe performance problems with Blueberry Garden, on my rather recent computer.

Didn't have problems with other XNA games, though, so I'm assuming it's just something fancy that Blueberry Garden's doing that my video card doesn't like, as opposed to an XNA-specific performance issue.

[PlayMeTape]

Well you can package your build in a ClickOnce installer. But the files manifest in some nasty ways (only way to get rid of them is to remove them from Add or Remove Programs). That installer automatically checks if you've got the prerequisite files installed and otherwise it downloads plus installs them. I've had som graphical bugs occur from running programs installed with ClickOnce. I've got no idea why though. So I try to avoid that.

Your only other option to make it simple is to create your own MSI installer but I haven't found any good free programs for doing this, but I'm really not that technical.

[DeadPixel]

XNA dev here.  

When installing an XNA Framework application to a non-development PC you need 2 things.  The .NET Framework that you target in your application, and the XNA redist for the same.  

The saavy XNA dev may prefer to target .NET 2.0, as most Windows users will have this installed already.  If not the binary is much, much smaller than the 3.5 download.

As for packaging the common solution is http://www.codeplex.com/xnainstaller which is a WiX-based installer that is targetted at our framework in particular.

ClickOnce is pretty terrible.

So, no, it's really not that bad.

[PlayMeTape]

Wow, thanks for the tip! I just changed my entire Gamma program to run on .Net 2.0 with no problems whatsoever. Now I can use that WiX installer as well (which I've seen before but wasn't sure of how I would make it work with 3.5).

[iamwhosiam]

does the wixXna installer work with XNA 3.1?


- side note, if you turn off the bloom shader in settings file for blueberry garden it runs faster on lower video cards.

[iamwhosiam]

oh never mind it does. prolly should have read the docs before I asked a question...

[Izzimach]

The original XNA/Game studio was pretty poor in this regard; there were the DirectX and .NET requirements but most people didn't know about said dependencies until they tried to run their game on somebody else's computer.  Some intrepid souls tried to make installers but many were messy, complicated, and/or didn't work so well.

The most recent version of game studio (3.1) is a lot better; it includes the ClickOnce installer which, while not great, seems to properly figure out what additional stuff to install.  And as was mentioned above, there are now some robust third-party installers.

TL;DR version: it used to be a big hassle, and it's a lot better now.  However, you still need to be aware of the dependencies; you can't just post a .zip file and say "HEY GUYZ D0wnLoad MY GAME PLZ"

[moi]

There are so many devellopment options nowadays, why bother with XNA if it's just for PC?
All you do is just lose some players.
Unless you're a .net evangelist there is no reason to use it.
D

[astrospoon]

There are so many devellopment options nowadays, why bother with XNA if it's just for PC?
All you do is just lose some players.
Unless you're a .net evangelist there is no reason to use it.
D

Yeah- this is really starting to convince me..  I'll probably just use my C++ engine. If I ever want to port to XBLIG, I'll just suck it up and do it.

[Stegersaurus]

Bah, I'm an XNA dev because I primarily put my stuff on XBLIG, but I'd really like PC builds for the purpose of playtesting and demo distribution, since the XNA community is limited in size and it's sometimes hard to get a good set of playtesters. I've used clickonce publishing and it worked for most people, but it's still not near the ideal solution, especially if I'm aiming for more "public" releases which I would appreciate a more robust installer for.

[Ravine]

There are so many devellopment options nowadays, why bother with XNA if it's just for PC?
All you do is just lose some players.
Unless you're a .net evangelist there is no reason to use it.
D

There are so many dev options nowadays, why not give a try with XNA ?

Even if you're not a .Net evangelist, C# is a great language, productivity flows from everywhere, and there's still room for control freak who wants to optimize stuffs. There are many interesting point in using XNA, even if you target for PC. The Content Processor is awesome in its concept, and you may replace it by the Nuclex alternative if you really want to. Lot's of open source code is available here and there (codeplex, creators club forums, blogs, etc.), there's a dedicated community with lots of great technical guys (means you can find help even on some nasty topics). Check #xna on EFNet.

If your arguments are more about the framework and the redist runtime of XNA, let's point some facts.

The XP SP3 enforce the presence of the 2.0 framework at least (if not 3.5, i cant remember well). Vista and Seven are shipped with 3.5. Which means, for most of the pc's on windows out there, the .net framework is installed.

The Redist Runtime for XNA 3.1 is about 7.3 MB, which is not 0 MB, i'm well aware of that. But it comes with the renderer and audio. Now if i want to make a 3d game for PC, i can choose Ogre or Irrlicht, grab some audio lib to do the job, like irrAudio or FMod. If i check in my Torchlight folder, the OgreMain is 5.5MB, with the DirectX dll, which is 3.7MB. The shader lib, still for Torchlight, since it's the only one which comes to my mind right now, is the CG one from nVidia, is 2.3MB. And so on. Packed (zipped, from normal to maximum, with 7 zip) i have something from ~5MB to ~8MB.

So if your argument are about size and required download, up to date windows pc are equipped with the framework, and the redist runtime is roughly the same as using some 3d renderer and external libs. So i clearly dont see why you may lose some players.

"Unless you're a anti .net integrist, there is no reason to not consider it"

[Dataflashsabot]

C# is a fantastic language, .NET an excellent library with the bonus that many(most?) already have it installed, and only need to once, and XNA is a fine game engine. Who cares if you're GIVING INTO TO THE MICRO$OFT MONOPOLY, use what works for you. When they come out with the, say, .COM framework, I for one won't mind installing it if it means it makes the programmer's lives easier and lets them get on with writing their game code easily and efficiently.