Hi, brand new to the forums here so hope I'm posting in the right place.

I'm working on building a mac app of my game (currently functional on windows) but have been running into distribution problems. I would be greatful if some folks could just download and try to launch the app to see if it doesn't crash and let me know what os version you are running.

The app is here: http://dinopuzzlegame.com/wp-content/upl...e.app_.zip

For verification of what you are downloading the games website is here: http://dinopuzzlegame.com/

Some technical info:
-Game is made in python using pygame
-Packaged with py2app which bundles my verison of python (2.7 apple), pygame and SDL (1.2.15) all into the app
-I'm bulding w/ os 10.7.3
-Game has crashed when opened on earlier os versions so would really like to hear someone using 10.7.2 or above

Thanks!

It does indeed crash for me on 10.6.8, with a somewhat uninformative crash log:


The screen fades to black before it crashes, so it's at least doing something and apparently trying to go into full screen mode.

A few things I notice looking through the app bundle:

• There are quite a lot of dylibs in here, some of which are redundant with system ones. I assume py2app is packing them all in automatically, but if you have any control over it, you can probably eliminate quite a lot of them and just link to what's in /usr/lib to decrease your archive size.
• The screenCap directory in Resources is a bit concerning. If screenshots are going to be written there at runtime, that won't necessarily work in the wild. Rather than writing to a location inside the app bundle, best practice is to put things like this somewhere inside the user's home directory, possibly ~/Library/Application Support.
• A lot of users (myself included) take issue with a game going into full screen mode right at startup. It's somewhat more polite to launch in a window and give the option for full screen sometime later. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a nice-to-have. An interesting discussion on this topic, if you're curious: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=23705.0
  

Hope this helps!

This is SDL_FillRect crashing and being caught either by SDL's or Python's signal catching mechanism. You should disable SDL's, IDK if you can disable Python's or what effect that might have, but it might be worth looking into.

Thanks for the replies. I tried packaging a version that launches in windowed mode and it works fine on other machines, so I'm guessing the SDL issue has something to do with Fullscreen, though I thought that was fixed with the most recent version of SDL.

@ThemsAllTook
I didn't know that about writing files at runtime to the bundle directory. The screen capture works when I've tested it on other computers. I did feel it was a bit sketchy but didn't know what else to do (this is my first game / programming project). What is the reason it wouldn't necessarily work and why it is a bad practice?

@OneSadCookie
I don't think I understand what the signal catching mechanism is. Would you mind elaborating a bit?

Thanks both, the feedback is very helpful

(May 11, 2012 03:23 PM)sabajt Wrote:  @ThemsAllTook
I didn't know that about writing files at runtime to the bundle directory. The screen capture works when I've tested it on other computers. I did feel it was a bit sketchy but didn't know what else to do (this is my first game / programming project). What is the reason it wouldn't necessarily work and why it is a bad practice?

In the case of some types of user accounts, the user won't have write access to certain directories like /Applications, which is a place your game will likely end up on some systems. It's safest to assume you won't be able to modify files in your application bundle or its directory at runtime. Some info from Apple here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/...2-CH3-SW11

If you don't have an easy way to call the Cocoa methods listed in the link above to get the directories from the system, it should work well enough to create a directory for your game's files in ~/Library/Application Support and just write your stuff there. Preference files would go in ~/Library/Preferences. This isn't as futureproof as querying the system for the file paths, but it should work on all current Mac OS X versions and for the foreseeable future.

Windows works similarly too these days, so if you're writing stuff outside the designated locations there (the APPDATA environment variable tells you where), your players will probably have problems if they're logged into Windows as a user without admin privileges.

This is one of those things you just sort of have to know, since your typical developer will be using an admin account anyway and won't run into the problem on their own computer. Another such thing to watch out for is case sensitivity...a Mac's hard drive can be formatted such that file names with the same letters but different capitalization are counted as different, though it isn't by default. If your code references any of your data files with different capitalization than the actual file's name, it'll work on a case insensitive system but will be unable to find the file on a case sensitive one.

Thanks for the info, I'll see what I can do about that.

Made a post an hour ago but edit it out because I've actually got one working on both machines now: 10.6.8 and 10.7.3. Here is that file:

*file removed*

For this to work, run launchDIS.app, not dinosInSpace.app. launchDIS.app is an applescript that just opens dinosInSpace. Not sure why, but without using that the application won't open correctly.

I've now found that opening the app normally makes the app launch incorrectly (same issue as above - it "hangs" and won't open unless the dock icon is clicked) however the app opens fine if opened from the app's bundle > contents > macOS file. I have no idea why. Has anyone else run into this issue when packaging apps?

allllright... so i think i've got something working finally. called applescript with python from the top file by adding:
os.system("""osascript -e 'tell app "dinosInSpace" to launch'""")

here's that: http://dinopuzzlegame.com/wp-content/upl...ee_mac.zip

it should work just like a normal app by dragging to the applications directory from the install folder. could a few folks test it? thanks

I had a post all written up, but it looks like you solved the problem while I was typing. Just tried it out, and it works great! Played through the first few levels. Cool game, I'm really enjoying it!

woohoo thanks.