Meta's Lost Notebook

A long time ago, I wanted to distribute my games freely and universally, and the only programming language I was bothered to make anything in was DM. At this time, BYOND already had a crappymethod of making standalone exes for itself:

Make an exe which:
- downloads your game for you.
-- if you don't have BYOND installed on your system:
--- download BYOND too.
- run game after all this downloading is finished or the game and BYOND have already been downloaded.

But this was not what I wanted. I wanted to distribute one file and have that file be the only thing that a user has to run to play my game, without having to download anything extra and wait a couple more minutes to play. I thought of a way of doing this, and py2exe was the first thing that came to mind. For those of you who don't know what py2exe does, it takes all the necessary dlls for a python script to run and packages them, along with a .exe which tells your PC to run said python script using the packaged python dlls.

This meant that the user didn't have to download python in order to use the program, which in turn gave the developer much more power over how he/she could distribute his/her python program/script/piecake.

So why couldn't something like this be done for DM? It seems simple enough. Why hasn't anyone tried it yet?

I suggested this method to the BYOND developers here which was met by general disagreement. So I said 'Darn them, I'll just do it myself' but I didn't have the skills necessary. So I put this idea in the back of my mind and let it rest there for many many months until tonight, when it popped up again, and I was ready for it this time.

I thought 'Well, why over-complicate things? I could just use a simple .bat file to run my dmb and have everything neat and tidy!'. The problem, again, was that this idea was very prone to problems, though it actually does work, and will need some support and tweaking from developers with more competence than I ( I lack the skills to progress this much further ). So I present to you, the brainchild of my idea, the Standalone version of Treasure Turner. After downloading the zip file, just extract and run "Treasure Turner.bat"

On a side note, if you run Treasure Turner.bat don't have BYOND installed it will ask you to "Select the BYOND Directory". I think this is for things like keeping track of the current BYOND Version installed and so on.