Development on Vinland: Arctic Assault reached a stage where i actually had to think about stuff like Installers and Patching Solutions.
After researching i realized that there is a great piece of Open Source Software that fulfills all those roles called NSIS (Nullsoft scriptable install system).
I had used this a while ago for my mod project, but never dived deeper into its scripting system.
So what does this offer now?
Well NSIS itself lets you script an installer system that looks and performs like the usual windows installer routines you are used to. Its very flexible in the way it handle things.
But the true power comes with plugins.
One of those plugins is called VPATCH -> this basicly checks for the difference between 2 files and outputs a patch file wich only contains those difference and is therefor much smaller in size.
This plugin gets expanded by a software called nsispatchgen wich uses this plugin to recursively go through a directory (including subdirectorys) and compares with another set. It puts out a complete structure of files and directorys that you can use to patch as well as a basic script wich you can use to build your Patching Installer in NSIS.
It wasnt easy to get it running first, while there is quite some documentation available it defintly lacks the easy-to-use way of paid-solutions.
But after having it set-up it works like a charm.
The installer itself is creating Startup menu entries, building an Uninstaller.exe and including the installed software into the registry aswell as connecting it with windows install/uninstall functionality.
The patches only contains a small fraction of the data now, so the players dont need to download the whole game data anymore, so its way faster and cheaper on bandwith.
All this gets presented with a nice and clean looking GUI - what much can an indie-developer ask for.
In case you are now interested and didnt heard about this before, check those software out :
Nsis.sourceforge.net
Nsis.sourceforge.net
Sourceforge.net
