Make Shortcut

In the file menu (or as a button on the toolbar) you will find a "Make Shortcut" command. This is handy if you want to create in icon that executes the appropriate command line to play your project outside of the GameDev development environment. It could come in handy if you need to find out the proper command line to use when editing an NSI script created by the install packager.

There are a few parameters involved in creating a shortcut:

• Shortcut name. Specify a display name for the shortcut. (Windows derives the filename of the shortcut by appending ".lnk" to this name. The ".lnk" extension will not be visible from Windows, even if you have "show extensions" turned on.)
• Path to GameDev.exe. This is defaulted with the name and path of the currently running EXE. This is the program that will be used to run the game (GameDev.exe). If you know that you will be running GameDev.exe from a different directory when you play the project you could specify an alternate path here. Also, you could instead specify the path to GDPlay.exe instead.
• Path to game project. This is defaulted to the name of the currently loaded GDP file, assuming it has been saved to a file. This indicates which project will be loaded to play when the shortcut is opened.
• Path to script. If you have created a vbs file (similar to the DngnPlay.vbs file used for the Sample project) to execute custom script during playback, you can specify the path and name of that file here.
• Display mode. You can use the default display mode set up (by the GameDev options dialog) on the target system, or the shortcut can override the default and specify a particular color depth for the display when running. Be aware that overriding the display mode to force 24-bit color (for instance) may make the shortcut unusable on systems where 24-bit color is not supported (my video card, for instance, only supports 16-bit and 32-bit).

After entering all the parameters, clicking OK will create the shortcut on the desktop and close the dialog. When you open the shortcut, it will start up GameDev in playback mode, load the specified project, play the game (or run the script) and then exit. There is no opportunity to edit the game project during this sequence.

The shortcut depends on the absolute path of GameDev.exe and the GDP file so it may not be reasonable to copy this shortcut to play the game on other systems, unless you had the other system(s) in mind when specifying the paths to GameDev.exe and the GDP file.

Some systems appear to have problems creating shortcuts. If you would like to construct a command line manually, use this format:

GDPlay.exe MyProject.gdp /p MyScript.vbs /d 16

If you don't have a script, leave out the *.vbs file reference after the "/p" switch. (Keep the "/p" itself in order to instruct GameDev to play the game after it is loaded.) If you want to use the default screen depth, leave off the "/d" and the display depth parameter. Full path names should be used when specifying a GDP filename and a VBS filename. GDPlay.exe can be substituted with GameDev.exe. GDPlay.exe is a stripped down version of GameDev.exe without game editing features.