Installation path for manual windows builds

GDevelop general Feature requests
1

After manually building the game, Instead of starting installation automatically windows drive (C:) after setup.exe is clicked, it would be great to have a choice of where we want to install our game.
I personally believe that I am not the only one who likes to keep things organized, for example:

C: System Related (Hard drive recovery software, drivers, etc.) - SSD
D: Multimedia (Pictures, Random videos, movies, music) - HDD
E: Games And Editing Programs (Steam, GDevelop, Sony Vegas) - SSD
F: Backups (Any Hand Picked folders from all other drives) - HDD

The reason is simple, in situations where I need speed, I use SSD, in other scenarios where disk space is more important I use HDD.

That’s just my example, but I think there’s a lot of people who would benefit from this simply because they have the same or similar setup.

2

You can do this pretty easily. If you’re doing a manual build, the following will have the installer prompt the user for an install path:

In your build directory, you need to modify your package.json starting at the line that contains “build”: { You want to change that entire section to:

    "build": {
        "directories": {
            "buildResources": "buildResources"
        },
        "nsis": {
            "oneClick": false,
            "allowToChangeInstallationDirectory": true
        }
    }

By changing oneClick to false you allow for users to select options (otherwise it skips that), and then allowToChangeInstallationDirectory to true to allow for selecting an install location.

1 Like
3

Thank you, that worked pretty well. One question tho, since I had “appId” and other stuff under “build” will it cause any issues now that I replaced everything with what u wrote?

4

Can’t speak to that. Worse case you could revert the changes and just add the info manually within the build section.

5

Actually that is something i was always wondering

Why we even have installer option?
We can go for zip but not everyone have zip extractor

Why not make it self extracting archive which extracts game folder next to self extracting archive file?
Wouldn’t that make more sense?

6

Not particularly, no.

From a technical perspective: Games are compiled using electron builder and the nsis installer. What you are describing isn’t a target option for either from what I can see, because the nsis installer exe can already be opened as a zip file, no reason to only make it a zipped exe or just something that dumps the file onto a folder

Additionally, zip decompression has been natively part of Windows since Windows 7, as well as most linux distros and macOS versions for years. Extra software for zip extraction hasn’t been necessary since Windows XP/Vista, and those OSes aren’t supported in general (by GDevelop or Microsoft)

(Also as far as I know it would then not clear certification for steam, for anyone looking to publish on steam)

7

@ZeroX4 You can still achieve what you want, because when you build your game, beside installer that you have built, you also have separated folder that contains all the game files which you can pack like that, or even use custom installer maker software.

8

Like always i miss some technical aspects
But even so i still see ppl getting zip file asking how to use it
So self extracting archive simply makes most sense to me

@GasmoN My idea is not what you can make but how to streamline the process
It’s not hard to make custom installer for yourself or self extracting archive
But thing is users mostly expect easy solutions
Like 1 click and your file is ready to share with others and easy to use for them
That is my idea

But i see now it can be more problematic