I’d like to take a look at the demo of Titan Quest. Sure, it’s a Diablo II clone, but the videos look pretty. I’m willing to take a flyer on it. I’ll download the demo and try it out. If I like it, I’ll buy it – I’m like that. Demos are a great thing.
But you forgot one little tiny thing: you need to make your demo work without requiring me to EDIT MY FUCKING REGISTRY.
Now, I’m sure that other people are able to install it just fine. But the fact that the solution to the “can’t install the demo” problem is stickied on your forum leads me to suspect that I’m not the only one with this problem.
So, let me take a wild-assed guess…some part of the install program correctly checks the registry to see what “ProgramFilesDir” is, while some other part of the install program assumes that “ProgramFilesDir” is set to “C:\Program Files”. If some user dares to…gasp!..have a non-standard Windows installation, the two different parts of the installer suddenly disagree and start having conniptions.
No, that’s not reassuring.
It gets better, though: did you read the solution to the “corrupted install” problem?
No problem, just delete a folder associated to a totally different application which USUALLY has the following meaningless string of letters and numbers for a filename. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Not recognizing a non-standard program files directory is just embarassing these days. I don’t know what these crazy kids are using, but in NSIS (which is a pretty popular installer toolkit), figuring it out looks something like this:
When I got my new computer, for some unfathomable reason the store chose to set it up without a C: drive (Windows ran from F:), and you would not believe how many programs simply refused to work. I went through so much tsuris over this, you should never know.
When I had a new hard drive put in, I insisted they make certain to create a C: drive, so named, just so I would be able to run my damn software. It shouldn’t have to come to that.
One of my mom’s old computers had a small C: drive with the OS and a larger D: drive for everything else. I had to repartition the damn thing. Every single program she loaded to it wanted to use C: instead of allowing a choice, so she ran out of room while using <25% of her total storage.
This seems to be a quirk of the WinXP installer. I just built a new dual-core P4 3.0G system this spring using a SATA hard drive as my boot drive. The WinXP partition manager appears to reserve drive C: for the Primary IDE channel, and since my SATA drive was on the 3rd channel, my system drive was set to F:
Unfortunately, I only noticed this after installing windows. After a brief bout of cursing (because I know a lot of legacy programs can choke when the system drive isn’t C:), I booted from floppy and ran fdisk to manually create my primary C: partition after which I did yet another install (Question: Does anybody know anything about commandline parameters for unattended installs?)
As to the OP, I agree, that’s just lazy programming. Editing the registry is simple enough (after backing it up) but users shouldn’t have to do so. It certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in the company.
A small C: partition and a larger “data” or “programs” partition is a fairly common setup. I typically go this route. I’ve come across one or two programs (typically shareware type things) that required the C: drive, but other than that everything allows a choice.
Now, REMEMBERING to switch it to “D:” is a whole other ball of wax. Not that I ever forget. Nope, not me. I’ve never had to uninstall and reinstall just cuz I forgot to specify “d:”.
All my links are at home, and I can respond (much) later if no one else does. I have a nice little program that will create a bootable windows cd with sata and raid drivers, sp2, all the hotfixes, and allow for unattended setup. Very, very easy to use. (Well, technically, the program won’t create the cd, just the files which Nero or Roxio can then burn as a bootable cd).
Well, I had an Epson multifunction printer, where if you wanted to install the image enhancing software, it automatically put everything (300MB worth) on the C drive. No choices, either you get it, and it goes to the C drive, or you don’t and it doesn’t.
Mostly real estate software. Maybe some printer software too. It’s also possible that she would have failed to select the D: drive for one or more installs, but I’m 100% certain that some of her programs forced C: as the one and only.
With my understanding strictly being at the level of “Ooh! I can draw pretty pictures and make websites and post to the Dope!”, still I’ll say I don’t think it was Windows. Some programs installed properly, but others didn’t. Sigh…
matt, I meant that creating an F: system drive instead of C: appears to be a quirk of the WinXP installer when it creates partitions on computers with certain specific configurations. In an ideal world, software developers would take these things into account and not assume that C: is always the default system drive.
@D_Odds: I’d definitely appreciate those links. It sounds like your describing “slipstreaming” which is something I’ve heard about but never bothered investigating until now.
Hodge, I used a free program, nLite to build a new Windows XP installation disk, slipstreamed with SP2 (I have the original OS), hotfixes, SATA and RAID drivers, unattended installation options (including entering in the product code), and minor customization features (stuff I would normally do the first time I booted).
I used the instructions here. Prior to using nLite on my most recent reinstall, I simply used a disc slipstreamed with SP2, but nothing else.
I believe **Hodge **is correct. My system’s main drive is G:, as it is SATA. I have no IDE drives. I’ve experienced weirdness with other (poorly coded) software that absolutely demanded a C: drive for some reason or other.
The thing that cheeses me off is not just that I need to edit my registry, but that I also need to create a particular directory on C:. Even if that weren’t impossible for me, I’d balk – why do I have to reformat my system to meet your software’s arbitrary demands?
