I will be setting up all the game playables on our new download site.
Since I have a chance to do this, I'd like to make every game's playable a bit more polished, by checking that they all have the various readmes. I will also be playing 3 links to idg, udg, and our network partner.

I'd like to place a udg-ish color background as well. So what format to use?

First DMG, and then what? b2? I recall a thread here that compared all the formats.

Is DMG -> b2 fine? Or any other better suggestions?

Cheers

b2 = bz2?

I had a lot of trouble with .dmg.gz , so don't use that unless you can configure the MIME types for it correctly. I would just pick something that the server could dish out. I was going to switch mine to .dmg.tar.gz, even though redundant, it was recognized in my case.

-Jon

I can place a background and everything, but, I refuse to use dmg because my game will not work in such conditions

>bz2
Yes, sorry for the slip up.

Found the thread I was thinking of:
http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthrea...ompression

His results show..
comp.app.dmg.bz2 = 7.2MB
comp.app.dmg.zip = 7.2MB

.app.tar.gz = 6.5MB
.app.tar.zip = 6.3MB
.app.tar.bz2 = 5.5MB

So, with the first format being dmg, should I just go with .zip or bz2? And should there be an in between format, like dmg.tar.bz2?? or dmg.tar.gz??

I think that more systems recognize zip so there is an advantage there.

Can someone please give me expert advice?

Also, just before I turn a folder into a dmg, I have all the icons set as I want, (position, size) and background color... How can I insure that after the dmg is made that the settings are kept? Or is it not necessary to work about it?

Thanks,

Fix your game then. You can't write into your own bundle.

skyhawk Wrote:I can place a background and everything, but, I refuse to use dmg because my game will not work in such conditions

That's your own fault. As Arekkusu said, fix your game so you don't write to the bundle.

Carlos: Tar isn't compression. It's just a way or wrapping many files into one. As for the format, my personal recommendation would be .tar.gz. I'm of two minds about whether or not to use DMG. On one hand, it forces people like Skyhawk to write their code properly , but on the other hand, it's easier to access a folder than a disk image. Yes, I know you could copy the disk image's contents to your hard drive, but that's still an extra step.

- Alex Diener

In my studies, I found that a read-only dmg that is bz2 compressed seems to have the best file size for dmgs, not a compressed dmg that is compressed again with bz2.

I really like dmg. It forces correct behavior, and is a very clean way to distribute an application that doesn't have tons of support files outside of its bundle.

On the other hand, if an application has files that are not contained with a .app bundle, then a dmg is not practical, but a folder is.

Bunzip2 (bz2) has some very nice compression. Surprisingly, sitx is often even better that bz2, but I dislike Stuffit with a passion. Gunzip (gz) is not the best compression, but many browser will transparently decompress a file sent with gz compression leaving no intermediate files behind in the user's file system, which is very nice.

I propose that you use a read-only dmg that is compressed with either bz2 or gz for a purely self-contained .app, but a tar archive compressed with bz2 (no gz because an intermediate tar file would be left behind by the browser anyway) for an application that is not entirely self-contained. I am more in favor of bz2 instead of gz because of the smaller file size.

Skyhawk, many people write-protect /Applications, so writing to the bundle will break the game anyway!

geezusfreeek,
Is there a little utility that I can simply drop a folder on, that will create the dmg, and then compress it automatically? I seem to remember grabbing something from VersionTrackr last night that was freeware, but didn't have time to see if it did everything automatically.

If such a little app doesn't exist, how about someone writing one up for me, as per geezusfreeek's advice?

Quote:I really like dmg. It forces correct behavior, and is a very clean way to distribute an application

I'm not distributing games everyday, but I agree, and this is the direction that uDevGames is heading. So, devs should take note. We must start someplace, so better to start with this year's games now that things will get quiet, then to start teaching people at the last moment next year. (ie, with these games "looking" the way I want, I can simply point to them as model distributions for next year's devs.)

Cheers,

I haven't had time to play with these:

http://www.c-command.com/dropdmg/manual.shtml
http://www.them.ws/themsw/dmgtool/index.php
hdiutil

The first is 10$ shareware. It is AppleScript-able and has lots of features. It does not appear to have an option to create a gzip of the dmg, so you'd have to script that.

The second may not have so many features, for example you may have to type in sizes and copy files to the image manually. Thus might be slightly more convenient than Disk Utility. The good thing about it is that the author freely explains how he's using existing command-line utilities to do his work.

Which leads to the third alternative: hdiutil. In Panther (maybe Jaguar) open a Terminal and type
> man hdiutil
Looks promising and free, but will take a bit of trial and error to get it working.

I'm looking forward to one day having a one-step method to package up my latest release and FTP it to the host of my downloads. But I don't have time to work on it now. Anyone have such a script/tool already? (Or we could wait for Tiger and develop it using the new automation capability.)

I asked this question on the Mac-Game-Dev mailing list, and John replied...

Quote:Conventional wisdom says that Bzip2 offers the highest level of
compression. However, I've actually run tests on some pretty varied data sets
(mostly assets for World of Warcraft though), and in my experience it's
a tossup as to whether Gzip at maximum compression wins or Bzip2 wins.
We use our own custom container format (MPQ) which lets us change the
compression type per-file, so in cases where every byte counts, I
actually have a utility which will try both types and pick the smaller
one for each file in the container. (This is only for special things;
most of the time we stick with medium-compression Zlib just to keep CPU
usage low.)

One other thing, the tool I found last night is:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/analog_only/en/software/
CleanArchiver 2.2.2

Quote:A utility for archiving with gzip, bzip2, zip, Disk Image (dmg), or StuffIt by dragging and dropping; it can delete all .DS_Store in a target directory before compression.

Download: CleanArchiver 2.2.2 (Mac OS X v10.3 or later/110KB)
http://homepage3.nifty.com/analog_only/s...chiver.dmg

Download: CleanArchiver 2.2.2 Source Code (92KB)
http://homepage3.nifty.com/analog_only/s...er.tar.bz2

Would be neat to have someone work on a custom version for us. For example....
1) Select game folder
2) Select background image for folder, hides the background folder
3) Makes sure all icons are 64x64 size, with font pt of 14, and all fonts are aligned and snapped to grid
4) Copies over the uDG readme
5) Select the OSI source code, and copies that from a folder called "Licenses" into the game folder
6) Creates DMG, (saving icon position, etc)
7) Compressed bz2

Boom, Done!

That would be sweet.

Personally, I prefer folders as I don't have to wait for them to mount. Also, .sit and .zip are practically built in to every version of Mac OS in some form and users know how to use them, so why not just stick with them ?

If we go with .dmg, I need to upload a newer version of Snowball this afternoon as the current version stores the prefs inside the bundle. (I know, I know... it was a low priority. )

In about 2 hours I'll post a new version whether you go with .dmg or not.

There are a couple of other key changes in it, like active web links to uDevGames and my website and also the ability to start at the tutorial stages (1 and up), the normal difficulty stages(8 and up), or the Advanced Stages(15 and up.) Any possibility this version could make it into the official download section?

How about those auto-mounting disk images that Apple introduced a while back? (10.3, wasn't it?) Click a download link, and you get an expanded folder in your downloads directory. Should even work for SkyHawk's broken stuff. On old systems, you get a normal .dmg.