Still working on Relic of the Viking 1.1

[jeancallisti]

In version 1.1 of Relic of the Viking, which is primarily meant to fix bugs in the game, I'm also experimenting with new things that will also be useful in Seven Cities, such as :

- Linux, Mac ports (hard). Maybe Android.
- multilingualism (not only adding the translations but everything that goes around it : A nice interface to choose the language, extended fonts, etc.)
- analytics. If the game connects to our website whenever it starts or whenever the player reaches a certain point then we can tell the number of people who play the game, and how many finish it, or other relevant things. (Please note: there's no plan on spying the players, i.e. uploading personal info such as their systems and such)
- Launcher. It would be nice to have a very simple program with a pretty image and a big "launch game" button, but more importantly an embedded web browser to display a pre-defined "latest news" page (from the Internet).

[selmiak]

wow, what ambitious plans. If you really can code up a thing that connects to a webserver I bet people would not let it pass their firewall, I wouldn't if you don't warn me beforehand. Like some opt in question, do you want to share your progress stats with the 7cog team?
it would be cool to also pull data from the server and display it there. "you made it to 50% of the game. only 20% of the people that started the game made it this far"

The launcher is an elaborate winsetup? afaik winsetup only runs the gamename.exe in the same folder with a lot of flags according to what you click in winsetup, so anyone who can code windows applications can code something like this...

[Cassiebsg]

I kick your launcher very far away, and any game that silently connects to a server is spyware, no matter what info it's sending. So yes, makes sure you ask permission for the player to share his "data".

As for the launcher, give the user the option to download the launcher or the normal zip package. And you're fine with me.

[jeancallisti]

any game that silently connects to a server is spyware, no matter what info it's sending

Haha, it used to be true, but nowadays, Steam and every single game launcher or even the modern games themselves (PC or console) would fall under that definition of spyware, especially the ones that have achievements. If you state clearly what you upload (we don't even upload anything, we just open an HTTP page), then nowadays this is 110% standard practice. As selmiak pointed out, even if you agree with the EULA, but then don't click on "Allow" in the firewall popup, then you're safe.

The launcher would indeed be unrelated to that connection thingie, and be part of the zip package (and is also not a replacement for winsetup.exe). The goal is really just to display the "news" page when you start the game. If you're computer-savvy enough to know what a "launcher" is, then you're computer-savvy enough to not click on the shortcut and instead directly click on the game's AGS .exe file just next to it.