Disc distribution at first friday

So if you're not familiar with first-friday type events (most aren't); It's an event that happens here in Philadelphia (and some other places) every first friday of the month, where artists and bands and numerous others set up stands along 2nd street and sell/show off/give away their work. There's usually 20-50 stands and a few thousand people come through during the night.

I'm planning to set up a stand and hand out DVD's with several popular FOSS games on them (Xonotic being one) to try and get some new players/build interest in people who otherwise aren't familiar with FOSS games. So before I do that, I wanted to come here and get some feedback from you guys.

I was wondering a few things myself, Xonotic isn't really distributed on physical media (often), so what would be the best way to package it? Should there (or is there) an installer for derpy Windows/Mac users? What else should be included?

There is no installer, the user should be instructed to copy the directory on their hard drive. I don't think running off the DVD would be fine in terms of speed compared to HDD.

If you think copying a directory is too complicated for the end user, then you'll have to ship an installer for either platform that does just that.

If you want to build an installer yourself easily then putting together a self extrating .exe with 7zip would be a good way to go as it's simple even if it's not a proper installer.

That won't work for macs without third party tools, right?

Not to mention GNU/Linux :-P.

An uncompressed directory on the dvd should be pretty straightforward to copy to the hdd even for the derpy users.

That won't work for macs without third party tools, right?

No, but no kind of installer will universally work for every platform. Hence if the .zip really is not deemed sufficient then a self extrator is the easiest way of hitting the most people.

Obviously we can't have a universal installer, but we can have three installers working with the same zip archive, which isn't true for self-exctracting archives. Anyway, this isn't really relevant anymore.

It's relevant to people who would pick up the disk and don't know which of the numerous executables to run on their system. I'm planning to leave disks around my college too. Obviously the target demographic here is people who aren't familiar with FOSS games/doing it yourself stuff, otherwise they'ed probably already be playing.

I don't think it would be too difficult to throw together an installer script for Linux/Mac (though I'd expect any linux users to be "in the know"). Windows might be another story.

easy mac installers are typically a folder with the app ... a shortcut to the apps folder ... and a customized background with an arrow pointing from app to apps folder ...

(finder (mac's default file manager) supports custom backgrounds)

Can't you just name the Archive "XONOTIC - UNPACK AND RUN DIRECTLY FROM THE UNPACKED FOLDER"? Windows users would try to run the ones that come with an icon (you could also rename them to "Xonotic SDL - if it doesn't work on your system, try using the GLX version" and vice versa to be perfectly safe). MacOS users would search for and find an app in the unpacked folder. Linux users would see the .sh scripts and probably know that they can execute them. What do you think?

IMHO it's useless. Even if the dumb users manage to uncompress/copy and run the proper executable, they'll get dropped at the point where you get the player setup. Or the video options, not to mention the server browser ("and omg! this da thing wants to go through the windoze firewalls! kill it, it's a virus!!!" :-P ).

It's easier just to give the game to the ppl who know how to use a computer.

Well I'm not entirely sure that people that are too dumb to run an executable from within an extracted folder would be also too dumb to fill in a name for their character and to join a server. They even might be dumb enough to have disabled the firewall by a friend. If we want to attract that kind of people to the game, then we should make it as easy as possible for them to at least get a game started in order to determine whether they like it or not by the first impression.

For the avoidance of doubts I'm not saying that non-knowledge of computer usage makes you any kind of less valuable person. I am just talking about target groups in terms of strategic decision whether we want to address those people or not.

Why not just include a simple and short readme file, alongside an uncompressed directory?

/xonotic/
/readme.txt

Where readme.txt looks something like:

WINDOWS
Put your right leg out.

OSX
Put your left leg in.

LINUX
Shake it all about.

WTF
Further help over at the Xonotic forum <Link>

No debugging, no dependencies.
Teach a man how to fish... you know the story.

Seriously, if someone doesn't know how to run an executable from within an extracted folder, it probably doesn't help at ALL to have a readme file included that one would have to open, too, just to tell the user that the only thing one has to do is to open that executable in the very same folder.

BUT

Another idea: how about we include in the archive a file called "setup" or "install" that comes with an appropriate icon (icon is important here), and that just opens a text box displaying what one has to do in order to get it going? Because getting it going is really so simple that even people searching for an installer would be able to manage it (I believe). That way we would have something that LOOKS like an installer so people searching for such a thing would be pointed into the right direction.

Seriously, if someone doesn't know how to run an executable from within an extracted folder, it probably doesn't help at ALL to have a readme file included that one would have to open, too, just to tell the user that the only thing one has to do is to open that executable in the very same folder.

Now you're making a bit of a fool of yourself.
I explicitly included the leading (root) slash, to indicate the file structure.

At the root there are two items, the Xonotic directory and the readme file.
This way, every user is presented with an obvious way to proceed, i.e. to read the readme file.
And from there, they will know what to do, because they have read the readme file.

Oh sorry, I missed that. Still, if someone extracts that file (probably in an overpopulated download folder), such a readme file gets overlooked easily. Anyway, if the problem is that people want an installer and are searching for one, they could be tricked to open the readme file if it looks like an installer :o)

Sev is making sense I think. It would seem (to me) that the most logical thing to do would be include the usual Xonotic directory with a readme at the top level (above xonotic directory). I think at this point that avoiding any kind of zip/extraction would be ideal, for the same reasons as above (derpy user doesn't know what to do with a zip file). It's already going on a DVD so space isn't an issue, and avoiding that extra layer of complexity helps.

The next best thing would be to write a quick installer script for windows/mac. A batch file for windoze and a shell script for mac would do the job, no?

I like the sound of that actually.

I don't really get the point of installer for Mac/Windows. On the dvd, the space would not be a problem, so we don't have to zip it, and all the end uers have to do is to run the according binary.

I feel like we're going round in circles here. Running it from the DVD will be very slow on most, if not all, systems. So you would need to tell them to copy the game to a sane folder on their own system. That's a bit clumsy.

Also: most 'casual' Windows users find it very hard to grasp that a complete game can function without having an installer at all.

I do wonder how much slower it would be from a DVD.
- Has anyone even tried that yet?
- Would it help to have the PK3 unpacked in the /data folder?
- Would it be faster from a USB stick (just for comparison, this will be too expensive to just hand out I suppose).

If disk access times are a bottleneck, unpacking compressed files is a sure way to slow it down.

DVD reading speed depends very much on the reader. It seems it goes up to 24x which is about 33 MB/s according to Wikipedia.

Would it help to have the PK3 unpacked in the /data folder?

That would be slower. Extracting the data is faster than reading the data from even a hard disk so the more you ZIP it down, the higher the load speed.

Only the loading times would get longer when running from the disc. The game should run normally after the map is loaded.

The idea of burning it uncompressed onto a DVD was not to run it directly from the DVD.
The idea was that the user could copy (drag&drop) the directory, without having to unzip it.

Anyway, I gave it a go, and the game loaded about as quickly from the DVD as from the HD. Playing on a server worked perfectly fine as well.
(Xonotic 0.6.0, on Linux)

Which, in my eyes, would be a bonus point for the simple solution.

I feel like we're going round in circles here. Running it from the DVD will be very slow on most, if not all, systems. So you would need to tell them to copy the game to a sane folder on their own system. That's a bit clumsy.

Also: most 'casual' Windows users find it very hard to grasp that a complete game can function without having an installer at all.

I do wonder how much slower it would be from a DVD.
- Has anyone even tried that yet?
- Would it help to have the PK3 unpacked in the /data folder?
- Would it be faster from a USB stick (just for comparison, this will be too expensive to just hand out I suppose).

Well, really, [b]I don't know much on the subject[b/], because I never installed games DVDs. In fact, I didn't knew you can even run games from dvds... Well, I don't have a Dvd-Rom soo...