ID:1487009
 
(See the best response by Tom.)
If you have experience with the byondexe client, could you provide some helpful tips?

I have no interest in the html/css splash screens, instead my desired result is;

1. To package the game into an exe, get a nice little "SpiritAge.exe" with an icon like any normal program.

2. Make this "SpiritAge.exe" available on the game's website, much NEStalgia has done.

3. Everyone is able to download and install like any normal program, get a shortcut on their desktop which runs the game directly as if you pressed a .dmb file when you have BYOND installed.

Seems remarkably straight forward but for the life of me I haven't been able to get any results from byondexe. The furthest I have gotten is a exe (which is never produced with the correct .ico) with a file size that may seem about right, but nothing happens when it is ran.

A "Fools Guide to BYONDexe" would be much appreciated. The documentation exists, but considering my results are consistent failures I believe there is something I am overlooking.
Best response
I am sorry this has been so troublesome (other users have complained previously but I thought we had addressed the issue). We'll provide a sample configuration as well as a public test hub/key to experiment with. In the meantime, here is what I did to get your configuration working. Keep in mind it may be possible that there is a bug that is preventing this from properly building on your machine; in that case, we'll have to do more testing with you to see what's up. But this worked for me:

1) Download the latest stable byondexe.exe: http://www.byond.com/download/build/503/ 503.1224_byondexe.zip

2) Extract to desktop (or wherever)

3) Open up byondexe.ini and edit to look like the following:
key = [byondexe key from the 'distribution' tab on your hub -- you have to insert this]
byond = setup/bin
include = setup/cfg
exe = game.exe
icon = setup/myicon.ico

(you can fill in the other settings in the template later; this is just to get the bare-bones)

4) Open the setup/ dir underneath the byondexe folder (eg desktop/byondexe/setup/). You should see the files hub.html and hub.css in that folder.

5) Put your icon, 'myicon.ico' in that folder.

6) Open the cfg/ folder underneath setup/.

6) Put your game distributable zip (created in DreamMaker's package files-- the same thing you upload to the hub) in that folder. Name it 'hub.zip'

7) Create a file called 'hub.ini' and save it to the same setup/cfg/ folder.

8) Open 'hub.ini' and edit to look like this:
LoginOptional = true
SkipSplash = true

What this will do is just launch your game as a Guest, no splash. The README-config.txt explains this and other options. I was thrown off at first because I didn't realize we used true/false here (I tried 1/0 which did not work), so we'll have to update the documentation.

So all told, your setup/cfg folder should look like this:
hub.css
hub.html
hub.ini
hub.zip

9) You are good to go! Now run byondexe.exe, which should open a command prompt and hopefully say "Success!". If that worked, you'll have a file called game.exe in the directory and it will use the icon file you provided. Running it will just launch your game.

Let me know if that works for you. If not-- and you followed the instructions precisely-- we may have a platform-specific issue.
Everything works, only problem I noticed is, no matter what you put in the byondexe.ini, the exe must always be named game.exe . If it's named anything else, it will not open nor do anything.

EDIT
Chris managed to fix this by deleting the local game files for Spirit Age under My Documents/BYOND.
The exe name should make no difference. I talked with Chris and it does seem like there is a permissions check in the BYOND/bin/game dir that we'll want to do before extracting the files there.