BerryBots pre-release testing help

I tried to run BB but instead I got an error message:

"The program can't start because sfml-graphics-2.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."

It worked fine before.

Hmm - do you see sfml-graphics-2.dll in the same directory as BerryBots.exe?

Yes.

Any chance you are clicking into the zip and not the extracted folder? I know I've done that when Windows is hiding file extensions.

If it's not that, I'm pretty confused and will have to do some research. Windows 7 for you right? And does re-extracting to another location work? Thanks.

Aha!

When I open it straight from Explorer, it works fine. But, when I go through the shortcut I put on my desktop, I get the error. Are you making some kind of reference to that DLL that wouldn't work through a desktop shortcut?

You are correct, I am using Windows 7. (I've tried linux, but I haven't gotten the hang of it yet.)

Ah! Ok, that makes some sense. Really glad you uncovered this one!

It needs the DLLs somewhere that the system will find them. Having them in the same dir as the .exe works, and lets me avoid needing an installer or polluting your system with DLLs (or so I thought). But maybe I do need an installer after all, or to static link everything (all the required DLL code goes right into the .exe, basically).

The desktop shortcut works for me on Windows 8. It's definitely a shortcut on your desktop right? Not a copy of the .exe? I think if you want a work-around for now, you could copy the DLLs into Windows\System32, or add the BerryBots directory to your PATH.

You're right. I actually copied the .exe file to my desktop folder. It's fixed now.

It probably would be a good idea to use an installer or have all code in one file, in case somebody else does something stupid. ;)

Oh cool, good to hear. I am looking into installers now, Inno Setup looks promising.

But I may put the installer off to next release if it's not totally breaking anything. The bigger piece of work here is that with the code in "Program Files", I'd also want to move bots/stages to somewhere else (configurable, eg My Documents\BerryBots), and then need a way to find them (like via the registry). I already have to do it this way on Mac OS X, and it does seem like a better setup. Right now it just knows to look in the subdirectories on Windows/Linux.