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Tips for Distributing from PyGame?

A topic by Dirty Bunny created Feb 08, 2018 Views: 653 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 5
Submitted

Anyone ever developed Python on Linux and then ported to Windows? I would love to make my game as accessible as possible, and that definitely means having a .exe for Windows users.  I've heard of things like py2exe but I have no idea how much trouble they can be, or whether it's easy to do from Linux.  (I have a single windows machine but ideally I keep that as a /target/ machine to check if the exe was made correctly.)  My only external dependencies are PyGame and Python Image Library if that helps.

Submitted

From what I know, there should be no problem running any Python thing on a Windows computer since it's a language not unlike Java in that it has its own runner machine to run its specific code.

All Py2Exe does is bridge the gap and make Python not be required to be installed in the target computer, so, I don't think you're going to have any problems with what you want to do.

Submitted (2 edits)

I know, there's a reason I said "accessible".  Sure, technically, once there's code, a windows user "only" has to install python, pygame, and PIL, THEN download my tarball and run it.  That's fine for linux users (not because linux users are hardcore, it's /actually a lot easier/ to install pygame and PIL, and python is already installed), but windows users will be installing three programs they may never use again from different websites just to play a silly internet game.

My question was more about, is there a history of Py2Exe working well under wine, or can it cross-build to windows from linux?  Is there a different path (or specific way of using Py2Exe) that will save a lot of time?  Basically asking if anyone's already done the yak-shaving on porting to "easy" windows, because any given hour of yak-shaving I save goes straight into game features.

Basically, I'm asking if any one knows the "smart and easy way" to do this thing that I'm sure I can figure out how to do, possibly the hard way.

HostSubmitted

cx_Freeze is cross-platform, and PyInstaller's FAQ explicitly says Wine should work for a cross-build, though I've never used any of these tools myself and can't comment as to how good or easy-to-use any of them are.

Submitted

cx_Freeze is amazing, it's definitely worth using. Me and a friend used pygame to export once and it took us days to get executables, but cx_Freeze worked first time.