Programming is not just about code…

So it occurred to me that as i come closer to releasing something, I’ve not yet ventured out of the debug environment of my IDE (Visual C++ 2008, which apparently coddles your code to a great extent.)  I decided to try a release compile and see if i could get it to run outside of the development environment, what fun that was!

First of all, it highlighted a bug in my code that the debug compile never did, I’d only assigned 5 surfaces for sprites, not the 9 that i was actually using, that took a few attempts to figure out!

Then i found a couple of people couldn’t run it, this confused me as I’m writing in plain C++ and SDL, and I’d included the SDL DLL.. Anyway, to cut a long story short (too late?) people who don’t have it installed, need to install the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, its only 1.8mb and I’ve had commercial games that have forced the 2005 redistributable on me in the past, so i don’t feel so bad about that.

After all the fuss, the 3 people I’ve sent it to have all got it working

I’m especially proud of the fact my game currently occupies 14kb as a release executable (either i write efficient code, or games are worryingly more expansive than i dare think about..)