Mac Support using pdeploy

I’ve been a Windows user my whole life, so I’ve never used a Mac before. Ever. So when I generate my installer for Mac using pdeploy, I get 3 files within the osx_i386 folder: myGame.pkg, myGame.app, and myGame.zip. Which file do I give the end user? Should I compress all 3 of them? Thanks in advance.

The .app is a special directory structure that contains your self-contained application. When users double-click the .app, Mac OS X will run your application from whatever location it is in. If people want to install it into their system, a common approach is just to drag it into the /Applications directory.

The .pkg is an installer wizard which contains the .app inside its archive. The installer automatically installs the .app into /Applications/.

The .zip is simply a zipped version of the .pkg, I believe, for your convenience, because the .pkg format is actually a directory. But so is the .app, so I suppose we should really be having zipped versions of both.

You can choose between the .pkg and .app approach - you don’t need both. I would recommend the .app since installation is more transparent and flexible and less involved, but the .pkg can be useful eg. if you want to force your user to agree to a license first, or simply want to create a more automatic installation experience.

Of course, I do not recommend distributing untested applications, so I would suggest getting someone to test your application on Mac anyway.

Ok thanks! :smiley:

I don’t recommend giving it out to someone, unless it’s a staff or a HIGHLY trusted friend of yours. I would probably recommend using something like virtualbox and testing it there. But I don’t know too much on this subject :stuck_out_tongue:

Crazy Clyde, the source code is extremely well protected. The chances of someone knowing how to hack the executable are VERY low, and even after that, the chances of them also knowing how to use multify on the .p3d file are pretty low. I’m quite confident that it is safe to distribute.