Stele 8: release time...
Yes, the Stelai are back, and in this Stele we will cover “Releasing Europa Barbarorum II: what could possibly go wrong?”
Take a minute to think about Medieval II: Total War (or Kingdoms, if you prefer) and some mods. Stunning mods, immersive mods, mods which provide hours and hours of fun as you play them over and over again. Mods that have been crafted with great care, and attention to detail, pushing the boundaries of the engine and making it the best it can be.
Now think a minute about installing them. Is it smooth? Easy? Does it just work, right out of the box? Unfortunately, no. It turns out installing a mod is surprisingly difficult. But that is not quite right. The better answer is that it turns out a lot can and does go wrong. As the Europa Barbarorum team, we have first hand experience of what can possibly go wrong since we have made a few releases of Europa Barbarorum I to start with and have the battle scars to prove it.
See if you would have thought of all these issues by yourself (this exercise is particularly useful if you were thinking of making an installer for your mod yourself):
- The UAC feature in modern versions of Windows (Vista, 7).
- Some fans might use 32 bit versions of Windows, and others might use 64 bit ones.
- Medieval II Total War is typically installed under “Program Files”.
- You should not need to be administrator to install a mod. Reason is that it may interfere with the ability to play the mod as a normal user (see 1 and 3).
- Your mod is too large for a single installer.
- Speaking of size: for your fans to download your mod, you must have uploaded it first!
- Your mod needs to work with Steam versions of Medieval II Total War/Kingdoms
- Desktop shortcuts and Start Menu shortcuts need to know the location of Medieval II Total War/Kingdoms
- It is possible that Medieval II Total War/Kingdoms are installed, but you have no way of locating it automatically (see 8).
- It is possible that both Steam and retail versions of Medieval II Total War/Kingdoms are installed on the same computer. Can you install only one copy of the mod which can be played through both?
- You want the ability to support multiple languages for your installer (and mod).
- Fans who do not understand your installation guide.
- Fans who do not read the installation guide first (and may make mistakes).
- Angry ones who did not manage to figure out how to install your mod for themselves and are now at the gates, demanding technical support from you.
- Medieval II Total War requires numerous IDX/DAT files which you need to provide with your mod; and you can't ask your fans to jump through the necessary hoops to let the game generate those files themselves.
- The Launcher program included with Medieval II Total War/Kingdoms has a few quirks. These quirks affect how you need to install your mod, in order for the Launcher to be able to launch it correctly.
- Not all files you need to develop a mod may be needed to play it. For instance, for descriptions of units and buildings only the binary versions (strings.bin files) are required. The source code is not used by the game.
- How long will it take for an installer to be assembled? Who is able to build an installer, and are they always available?
- What if you want to release a patch for your mod?
- What if a fan reinstalls the mod with a different configuration of options? (For instance the first time this fan selected to install a Desktop shortcut, but the second time he only wants a Start Menu shortcut.)
- What if a fan wants to install multiple copies of your mod? (E.g.: for some modding of their own?)
These are all issues which we felt we needed to address in our installers with Europa Barbarorum II. It would be well beyond this Stele to provide answers for each of these issues; instead we will highlight a few choice examples.
Firstly, being able to install the mod in multiple different languages might not seem such a “must have” feature at first. That is, until you remember that Europa Barbarorum I has been translated into German at one point. Taking this into consideration early on also helped identify more technical issues: issue number 20 becomes more self evident once you realise that a shorcut called “Play Europa Barbarorum II” in English will have a completely different name in French!
Secondly, you may already have spotted that issue number 18 is actually another question in disguise: “how long will it take to release the first beta?”. The answer is: thirty five minutes (excluding updating the website). This is how long it takes to convert all the files that make up our mod into a file which contains the installer and make it available for download from our internal FTP server. We know this because we have done several of these releases for testing purposes (to test the installer, among other things).
Thirdly, with Europa Barbarorum II we attempt to automate the entire process of building an installer and doing a release. We use the server that hosts our website for this purpose: by building the installer on that server we avoid having the upload it over the Internet. This makes the whole process considerably faster, because in our test runs the final generated file topped out at about 1.1GB. Imagine you had to upload 1.1GB from your computer to a webserver!
That is it for now. Regards,
Originally Posted by The excited one
