The windows msi installer got some new attention from me this time. Many people have been having problems with the directx 9 detection. After some research on the issue the web installer we use does not have the best support for this. Also the (commercial) software I use to make the msi package does not have good support for msi installer to check dependencies on the fly. In order to do this properly I would need to make a .exe bootstrapper for the msi. This is unwanted as msi has some nice features for example sysadmins at eg. schools to mass install the client for big amount of machines. Before we switched to msi installers we shipped the directx installer and always ran it without checking if you have directx, this we wanted to avoid with some smarter stuff but now it seems our approach was not the best.
So for this release and the next ones after it we have re-enabled running the directx web installer every time you run a Tundra installer. The installer itself will do a brief check (when you start hitting continue franticly) if you have directx 9 and will do no additional downloading or installing, if you dont have the latest 9.0c it will install it for you. Hopefully you run this at least once to check if you have it, if you are sure you have it you can just hit cancel on the directx installer and it will go away and wont affect the Tundra installation in any way. OpenAL and the C++ runtime still have the smart checks and will not prompt you to install anything if you already have it, for these the smart checks are working well so I left them as is. If you’d like to check directx after the installation you will find a new shortcut start menu -> realXtend Tundra -> Help -> Instal DirectX 9 to go trough the validation steps again.
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