Troubleshooting this TutorialSometimes, even though you try hard to understand the information in a tutorial, things don't work out quite like you want it to. This page is here to help you resolve any problems you might be having with the tutorial on using ClickOnce to distribute your game. The Common Mistakes section describes common problems that people have when doing the things in this tutorial, and how to resolve them. The Frequently Asked Questions section describes questions that people have that aren't related to mistakes, but rather, trying to understand the stuff better or exploring how it can be used. If your problem or concern isn't addressed here, feel free to add a comment below, so that I know where you're having trouble. I like to keep these pages fairly clean, so I may remove comments that I felt like have been addressed. If I remove your comment and you don't feel like the problem has been fixed, repost the question and we'll take another look at it. If a tutorial has a mistake in it, I will fix the mistake and reply to the comment with a brief explanation. However, after a couple of weeks I'll likely go back and remove the original comment as well as my reply, because, hopefully, the problem will have been fixed, and it won't be a concern any more. |
Common MistakesNone listed yet… |
Frequently Asked QuestionsNone listed yet… |
Es klappt bei mir nicht, ich habe 2 fehler:
1. Veröffentlichen nicht möglich, da ein Projekt nicht erstellt werden konnte.
2. Fehler beim Signieren: SignTool.exe wurde nicht gefunden.
Translation to English:
It works for me, I have two errors:
1st Not publish because a project could not be created.
2nd An error occurred while signing: SignTool.exe was not found.
I have a problem when publishing my game. I used the "click once" publish method but still everyone I send it to have to download Visual studios and XNA. This just doesnt cut it, it requires them to look up the right version to download etc and might take anywhere from 10 min to hours.
Hmm… they shouldn't need to download Visual Studio or XNA Game Studio to run it. If they don't have the right version of the .NET framework, it will go out and grab it and install it, and there are some XNA redistributables that would need to be downloaded as well, and maybe that's what's happening.
I've seen that take a while, myself. In fact, the first time I tried to use ClickOnce for an installer, I had the program on a flash drive in a job interview. It took 20-30 minutes to get everything set up. The .NET framework isn't exactly small.
Having said that, though, there are a few things you might be able to do to speed things up. For one, if you look up what versions of the .NET framework are on most people's computers (like, say the 3.5 version, as opposed to the newer 4.0 version), and choose that, you're a lot more likely be able to skip that installation step. Off the top of my head, I don't know what version that would be (3.5 sounds good, though), but it is something to consider.
Second, there's an option somewhere in there that allows you to include the DLLs instead of simply saying "I need the XNA redistributable" (which means if it is missing, it would go download it). If a person is downloading from the Internet, this makes no real difference. It's download it up front, packaged with your game, or download it after the installation process has already started, and it is a matter of picking your poison. However, if you are handing your stuff out on a CD or something like that, then the DLLs are there, ready to be used and don't need to be downloaded.
If all else fails, you may want to try using a different installer. For instance, I've used InnoSetup before (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) and it is decent, though I've considered using WiX (http://wix.sourceforge.net/) instead, lately, as it is based on the Windows Installer, and uses XML—two technologies that I've been relatively impressed with in the past. With either of these, though, you'll need to go way out of your way to make sure that those pre-requisites get installed if they aren't already. ClickOnce takes care of all of that for you, which is why I like it so much. And truth be told, the user's machine would still need to install that stuff, one way or another, and using something else may not actually speed things up. But it might. During that interview that I mentioned, it seemed excessively slow, and that may be simply because of ClickOnce. Typically, the .NET framework only takes a minute or two to install.
So, for whatever it's worth, that's my thoughts. Like I said, ultimately, the end user should NOT need Visual Studio, Visual C# Express, XNA Game Studio, or anything else along those lines. Just the .NET framework and probably a few DLLs for XNA, which should be relatively small.
cannot install game on computer comes up with error mesage
You've got to be more specific than that. What error message? What settings did you use? Was the error during install, or as the program was launching?
Nice explanation, thanks
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