Publish Releases

[SaxxonPike]

Lyon/Roton are at a point now where they should be packaged up automatically for release.

• Windows should just be as easy as running publish.bat and zipping up the output folder
• MacOS has some additional considerations if we want to do a fancy app package that people can just drag to Applications
• Linux is outside what I know, help will be greatly appreciated

[Spectere]

Hey'a! Welcome back. :)

I've successfully created macOS app bundles using DotNet.Bundle. One asterisk: this project hasn't logged a commit in five years, so it's probably not being actively maintained. I think the last .NET version I used this on was .NET 8, so I can't confirm that it works with 10.

That said, I have built .app bundles manually, and I'm pretty sure that's still viable.

For Linux, something like AppImage or Flatpak would make the most sense. AppImage is more or less an .app analogue (so people could unzip and double-click without having to worry about installing the .NET runtimes), while Flatpak basically is a distro-agnostic package manager. I think AppImage would be best in this case, given that it's better suited for independently distributed applications.

The main sticking points would be the startup mode (I couldn't load an SZT in ZZT mode and vice versa, so playing SuperZZT worlds would always require some sort of manual invocation) and which directory the user lands in when they double-click the app. I suspect fully fixing this would require a directory-aware file browser given that the application path and user data would be decoupled. It all depends on how closely you want to adhere to ZZT's look and feel.

[SaxxonPike]

@Spectere ZDoom style startup dialog, maybe. /shrug