Portable Zip Download

[AntumDeluge]

Would you mind adding a portable .zip or .7z download for Win32 binary on the Sourceforge download page?

[ghost]

You could easily compile one build yourself described in Contributing to Tiled and provide it to other people - keep in mind though, that the editor is not "completely" portable as it writes some properties to the registry on Windows systems. (I don't know how this works under Mac OS and Linux)

[bjorn]

Tiled currently adapts the way it stores settings to the operating system. For a portable build, you'd want to include some code that tells QSettings to use the .ini format and force it to store the settings file in the appropriate directory.

I'm not primarily a Windows user and am not very familiar with portable apps, so it would indeed be nice if somebody else could help with this task.

[bjorn]

Ah, btw rather than hosting our own portable .zip package, I'd prefer a package following the guidelines of http://portableapps.com/ and for it to be uploaded there. That should help users managing their portable version of Tiled alongside other portable apps.

[seiyria]

I'm looking to get an entirely standalone version of tiled (1.1.4) as a portable zip (I'd like to programmatically download, unzip, and run tiled and manage it alongside my app). Is this possible at present?

[bjorn]

@seiyria Official releases for Windows are currently only in MSI format. The continuous integration system does also generate ZIP files, but they don't have an easily accessible or stable link.

It would be nice to provide also plain ZIP archives, but it's unlikely that I would retroactively provide these for past releases. Why do you need version 1.1.4 specifically?

Note that since the generation of a ZIP archive is already implemented, you could also copy one of the recent builds to a stable location of your own. It's not "portable" yet though, in the sense that Tiled currently always stores preferences in the Windows registry and places a default session file among your roaming files.

[seiyria]

Specifically 1.1.4 because I built my game on it, and there were some breaking changes in future versions that I don't have a ton of time to track down :(

So I can zip up the Tiled directly from where it's installed? I can host it, no problem. I don't exactly need it to be truly portable, I just need to be able to run it and download it from a specific location.

[bjorn]

Specifically 1.1.4 because I built my game on it, and there were some breaking changes in future versions that I don't have a ton of time to track down :(

I guess you mean the change to the JSON map format made in Tiled 1.2? I've added a json1 plugin in Tiled 1.2.2 that still saves in the pre-1.2 format, which you'll still find in the latest version of Tiled. The only problem for your use-case, is that this plugin is disabled by default and the only way to enable it is by going into the Preferences. That's something that would be resolved if we implemented support for a portable settings file since then you could ship one that has the plugin enabled.

So I can zip up the Tiled directly from where it's installed? I can host it, no problem. I don't exactly need it to be truly portable, I just need to be able to run it and download it from a specific location.

Right, you should be able to just ZIP up the installation folder as well!

[seiyria]

I see! It's great to hear that there's a backwards compatible solution, but as you say, it would need to be enabled. I'll definitely keep an eye out on this issue (or if another one is required, that one) and I'll adjust my situation accordingly - I would love to use the latest Tiled!

[bjorn]

With #2945 resolved the remaining task for this issue would be to actually provide an official "Portable" ZIP download that ships with a tiled.ini alongside the tiled.exe, so that it has the portable mode enabled by default.

For your use-case, @seiyria, you should be able to just download the upcoming Tiled 1.7 release, put a "tiled.ini" alongside the executable, use it to enable the "json1" plugin (and disable the "json" one) and then zip up the folder.

It would still be nice to also make Tiled available from http://portableapps.com/, but it would take some additional changes to conform to their guidelines.

[seiyria]

@bjorn Thanks, and thanks for being responsive to such an old issue. I'll give that a try and report back within few days.

[seiyria]

@bjorn awesome, this works perfectly! I love the new tiled!