Yeah… I need to be more active, but doing rewrites takes a good chunk of time.

While the launcher’s re-write is almost complete (just need to write a bit of code that missing from WPF), I needed a new tool to make the installer. Flexera seems to have stopped supporting the LE version of installshield. It’s a shame since this was a great tool (mainly since I could install the .NET Framework when needed). So, I needed to search for a new tool. And I found a combo. WiX (Windows Installer XAML) provides a good suite to write an installer, along with fetching dependencies via its bootstrap. Which is great. But this is a pretty complex tool. Luckily, I found another tool that helped to make the GUI for the new installer. The result is this:

This combo is pretty neat since it allows better customisation (so, fewer pages to go through and give it a nicer flair) and lets me add languages to the installer. Pretty handy indeed.

Speaking of the launcher, I did some re-tooling in the logic, thanks to data binding. In the current version, I had to practically program the entire logic to manipulate the GUI (such as disabling some buttons when no saves are in the folder). WPF allows a “code-less” way to implement that logic, by simply binding some properties of the items in the GUI to specific things. This makes the launcher less of a hassle to maintain and cut down unnecessary code from it. It does need some things to work on, but for the most part, it’s easier for me to develop the game and the launcher. Here’s a snippet of the implementation:

That is all for now. See you in the next post.