Hello,

I'm  hoping to be able to publish using butler, but what I'm uploading is an app with filetypes of its own the user will expect to be able to double-click and open the app (this is more like a situation of word processor files than savegames, so it's especially important).

On MacOS this will be fine, the associations are in the app's plist and the OS finds them on download.

On Linux, there's no hope of my one-girl shop getting .desktop file installation working right across distributions, so I'm just shipping an AppImage, which butler nonconfigurably(? that I can tell) crams into a .zip, which is the exact kind of trivial jank to which Linux users are entirely numb (I use Arch BTW). That's fine too.

On Windows, the way to set file associations seems to be with an executable installer, which is yucky to find inside a zipfile the way butler forces it, and also it sounds like itch then treats the unzipped .exe file as the game itself, based on this. That's just killer. Is there any way around this? I want to be a good itch citizen and use butler.

Bonus round: there's not a windows machine within three blocks of me that I know of, so testing any of this is really hard. I'm cross-compiling most releases on my Mac. I don't suppose anyone has a clever way to easily try things on a Windows box?

Thanks!

Hi.

I'm not sure I fully understand your problem.

In linux as in windows, the association between the extension of a file and the program is made at the registry level in the OS. (On Linux it's a bit more complex, but the concept is similar.)

If your problem comes from the side that instead of distributing the final binary, you are distributing an installer (setup), the problem is that in the absence of a manifest, the itch app understands that the only .exe you have will be the game itself.

If I understood your problem correctly, you can fix it by adding a manifest file that explicitly told the itch app what to do with the files.

I don't know MAC, but I imagine there are programs that allow you to create virtual machines with windows. For example windows 11 tiny inside virtual box

Thank you, Tiny11 looks like exactly the thing!

I didn't know about the manifest thing but that looks like almost what I need. It'd allow me to at least tell the user what itch downloaded is an installer, but it still seems janky to stick an installer in their start menu (as I understand itch does with downloaded exes, matter what the manifest says? I think? It's not clear from the docs).

Is there truly no way to make itch understand that an .exe file I've published is an installer, and not the game itself? Alternatively, is there truly no way to tell itch what file associations to make for my app?