Anyone want to offer pros and cons for each of these? Learning curve, best features, worst problems, etc. I'm more interested in a comparison of features from an indie game developer's perspective than an opinion of which is better. But anecdotes of your experience with one or the other or both would be very valuable and greatly appreciated as well. Thanks!
I used Inno then switched to Nsis. Both did their job. Inno is easier to learn and use, Nsis seems more powerful. Nsis adds 30K to the download size overhead, Inno some 300K (this made me switch - to my 1MB games the overhead is significant).
NSIS. The thing that sold me was the minimal initial footprint, and being able to run it from a command line. I also like the fact that, if I want to modify it, I can do it without having to buy delphi, though the chances of me doing that are between slim and none.
I started with NSIS but switched to Inno (I think I did just the opposite everyone does Why? IMO it's easier and has all the features I want. It has also LZMA compression and (I think) NSIS doesn't.
Inno I haven't even tried NSIS, but Inno was very easy to use, yet it still gave me the power to customize some parts of the install process.
Same story here. InnoSetup is very simple to use, does everything I want and does it very well so I never tried anything else.
InnoSetup here. Very easy to use, although as Diodor mentioned a 300K footprint makes a big difference. I'll probably try NSIS later, especially seeing as there's a utility to convert InnoSetup scripts to NSIS scripts.
i used innosetup for about 5 years before switching to nsis... though learning to use nsis is much harder than inno, once you learn nsis it's pretty easy. the main reason i switched to nsis is: more control, better scripting feature, and it's easier to create custom wizard pages/functionality. in inno, if i wanted to create a custom dialog, i would have to write a lot of code, in nsis, it only takes a few lines of code to create a custom page with many different controls and various functionality. (though i think in the newest inno versions they made creating custom pages much easier). they are both great (and FREE!). the bottom line (IMHO): if you just need to create regular installs and the 300KB footprint doesn't matter to you, choose inno. if you need to do more than a regular install (custom pages, windows api functions, etc.), or you benefit greatly from the smaller footprint, definitely choose nsis. i switched to nsis and will never go back
Maybe HM NIS Edit? That's what I use to generate a basic script. Then I just go through the script and make any changes that need to be made... adding ifdefs for the demo version, etc. So you don't really need any kind of in depth knowledge of NSIS script.
To toss a quote FYI into the thread for everyone--you can compile Inno Setup installation scripts from the command line with ISCC.exe.
i used nsis in 3 games already but always ended editing script files manually, because they couldn`t erase all dirs automatically and about 10-15 didn`t get erased. usually just a matter of half an hour during which you keep installing/uninstalling your game and checking whether all dirs are out. so much for an automated process...
I'll probably start with NSIS just because it's smaller and the IDE looks as friendly as what I've seen for Inno. Thanks for the replies, everyone.
Same goes here, but for Inno. In the end, it's a matter of taste, but you guys convinced me to give NSIS a try... Thanks!
I downloaded the IDE for NSIS and created a basic install script within 10 minutes. There's nothing difficult about it. So, all things being mostly equal, I'll got for the one with the smaller impact on my download size and the nice scripting language for more complexity later. Thanks for everyone's feedback on this!
Inno here too.. and I'm also too lazy to switch! =) For those of you who experience a big heap added to the file, have you tried adding the following lines to the [Setup] part: Compression=lzma SolidCompression=true InternalCompressLevel=max