Knights and Merchants.net Forum

It is because XNA only plays WAV's (which must be collected in a weird aggregate file) and FMOD is non-free in some circumstances which I'm not about to risk - besides, it's more work to get it to do something, with XNA you just say Play("name") and that's it
But don't worry, it's only 160MB worth of music (55MB expected for the other sound files, but that's just an estimation), TKE will still fit on a CD multiple times
Currently there are some odd problems that cause the music to fail in Release mode, I have no idea how this could even be possible (the files are NOT missing from the release directory) (yes I mean to imply that the music Does work in debug mode, which it does)

I have another question about TKE:
how are you going to handle units render?

Shall it be full-color 32bit render or 8bit palleted ?

9400 units sprites are there, say each sprite is 64x64px and uses 16kb (32bit RGBA mode) - that is ~140mb of video memory. Now each player needs own set sprites with own color 140mb*6 ~1gb..

I ask because I need units display in my editor aswell, not all 9400 though

I'd say it doesn't matter whether you use 8bits or 32, since both will take up way too much space... There will have to be another method.

You mean you don't have a method yet? That's pity..

No problems were encountered with loading of sprites, and most certainly aren't 64x64 (most sprites are tiny)
I could load them as 8bit palleted it's unnecessary (and more work) as it doesn't take much memory anyway

the recolouring for the different players could be done in the shader to save duplicate textures but once again it didn't matter enough to do any work for

Hm, I guess if compact 8bit take 12mb, uncompacting it to POT textures would increase that at least twice, converting to 32bit another size increase.

12*2*4=100mb for all units.

Changing color in pixel shader is a nice idea

I don't use shaders in KaM Editor, but I can save lot's of space without animation data. That would be ~5mb for all units * players count ~100mb for everything.

Issue solved

If you consider ~100 mb acceptable, then the problem is solved. I'd reckon that's still a lot, but ok: it's probably the only way....

Maybe TKE will be able to be played without "installing" .NET and XNA framework.

I'll explain, there's a program called Thinstall VS, it reads all registry stuff and hdd, then you install .NET, XNA and TKE, and let Thinstall read it again.
Thinstall will then save the results, and, if everything went well, it will create a single 'package' that includes all, and you should be able to run it without installing .net and/or xna.

the Thinstalled package will be larger than the normal app, but that's normal.

tutorial of how to package a .net app with Thinstall. (22MB)
http://thinstall.com/demos/dnet20/

I didn't knew there's a solution already. Good find Thunderwolf

That would be very nice to be able to run TKE without all those .NET 300mb updates

By the way, question to harold: how's it going?

Going well, but this thinstall thing..
TKE actually uses .NET (it has to, it's in C#) - it's not like you'll get away with only the registry keys
It shouldn't need much in the way of updates though, you only need the following things:
XNA Framework 1.1 (2.0 will Not work, it's not backwards compatible)
.NET Framework 2.0 (3.0 may also work, but 3.5 shouldn't)
TKE itself (no comment)

Parallel FX (and therefore .NET 3.5) is no longer needed - I wrote my own wrapper around threads that is a lot smaller and is good enough for TKE

also, somewhere along the line I want to move to Fmod - to avoid that abysmally huge "aggregate of several WAVs"-file that is needed for XNA's audio (ridiculous system.. but it's easy to use) - but then, that's only a single DLL, it doesn't need to be installed, and everyone already has it (which doesn't mean that TKE won't include it, for completeness)

If the Thinstall thing goes well, it should be able to run it. It is able to Thinstall Paint.NET. (movie of how is posted in that other post). I wouldn't know if it is also capable of packaging XNA, but I guess it could be done.

And how exactly would that help? The DLL's are still needed, and copying DLL's + registry keys is what any installer does anyway

I guess idea is to make a bundle with everything needed inside. Would be wise to test it to see how much mb it adds to TKE, if thats below, say, 15mb then go for it.

Yes, that's the idea . I checked that movie again, it made Paint.NET a size of about 50MB, I don't know how large it normally is, though.

1.6MB usually
But seriously, why should all that crap be packaged with a program? People are expected to already have it - except perhaps XNA, but there is little reason to not just provide the redist