BoB 2 Installer -- Suggestions

[McMick]

Is there any way to have the installer check to see if the user's DirectX installation is complete / up-to-date? Also is it possible to check for video and audio drivers? I assume you could pick an arbitrary date and say "if your drivers are older than this, you need to update them before you play BoB2".

Just thought of this as people on the forum often feel the need to reinstall DirectX at the behest of the more experienced users in this bunch, and I figured you could save a few headaches this way.

[Scott - A2A]

It can be tricky finding out specific dates of files and such. Inevitably, when you add things, even something as simple as opening a web page, down the road something breaks. Then the installer fails, so we've learned to be very conservative with installers, to say the least.

What I would suggest is we simply have a single sticky on the top of the forum leading folks to the NVIDIA and ATI sites, that have automatic installers now. And also to the DirectX installer page.

Scott.

[PV]

I thought it was OK for vendors to include necessary bits of Direct X
in their distributions, to ensure they would run properly. I thought I
read that on Microsoft's website somewhere...

[Scott - A2A]

We have included that is some of our recent accusim products, but even those programs crash the installers on some machines. So what you end up with an installer that fails. I think it's best you keep as much of this stuff externalized from the installer, pointing the user to these locations, rather than automatically running them.

Scott.