[casual_games] If Vista is going to be such a problem...

[Alex St. John]

That's a clever idea Matt, I'll run it by my guys.  If that works we could automate wrapping all the games we publish that way to avoid that problem.  
   
  ----------------------------------------------------------
  Alex, 



OK, had another thought and realized more about what was going on and I need 
to correct my earlier email. I do see the error message your QA dept sees 
if I try to get to the game via the Start Menu instead of via the Games 
Explorer. 



Since Parental Controls blocks the entire folder in which your game is 
installed to, I think I am going to have to take the following steps to work 
around the Start Menu shortcuts not working: 



1) Create a stub executable in a folder separate from the game 

2) Link the start menu shortcut to the stub executable 

3) Have the stub executable make the check with parental controls to 
see if the game will be allowed to run (this can be done via 
IGameExplorer::VerifyAccess). 

4) If it can run then go ahead and run it, otherwise throw up an error 
message explaining why. 



Definitely a pain in the butt to do all this, but I don't see any other way 
to get start menu icons working. Shame it is that way. 



Matthew 



From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] 
On Behalf Of Matthew Douglass 
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:51 AM 
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List' 
Subject: Re: [casual_games] If Vista is going to be such a problem... 



Alex, 

I'm not sure why your QA department is seeing the behavior you are - but 
it's not what we've seen in testing with Vista RTM. WE get a much more 
normal message that the game has been blocked by parental controls. I've 
attached screenshots from that. 

Matthew 



From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] 
On Behalf Of Alex St. John 
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:32 AM 
To: casual_games at igda.org 
Subject: [casual_games] If Vista is going to be such a problem... 



During the break I promised to ask my QA guys to give me a report on the 
exact behavior of parental controls in the RTM version of Vista. I have a 
couple interesting screenshots that I'm not sure will make it up in my mail 
but they show the error dialogs Vista throws when a user clicks a game that 
has had parental controls applied to it. 



So IF a game is registered with the Vista game explorer and parental 
controls are enabled to apply to that game Vista throws an error dialog 
that offers to delete the LINK to the game from the game explorer. 
Interestingly Vista throws a different error for games parental controls 
apply to that are supplied with Vista by Microsoft. The only substantial 
change in behavior between the beta and RTM was the change that prevented 
Microsoft supplied links from being deleted but continued to offer to delete 
Non-Microsoft game links. I think it would be interesting to ask Microsoft 
why they presume to have the OS delete our game links when parental controls 
apply to them, but not their own. 



Both error messages make no mention of parental controls being enabled as 
the reason the game link is broken which is certain to be very confusing to 
any consumers who encounter these errors. 



-Alex 

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