Starting alr-2.0.2-installer-x86_64-windows.exe, I get the following system error (in German):
The program cannot be started since d3d12.dll is missing on this computer.
What is this DLL?
according to MS site
D3D12.dll is part of DirectX 12.
So what is DirectX and why is this needed for Alire? What can I do?
I see this is only on Windows 10 - I still have 8.1.
Can I use an older version of Alire then? Where do I find it?
Any reason not to upgrade to 10? It’s still freely available.
Because I don’t like windows 10.
I still have a windows 7 machine.
I fear this old iron will not be able to cope with 10, so I stick with 8.1.
So where can I get the last Alire version that doesn’t need that darn DLL.
It might be worth posting up that question as an issue on their github. Phrase it as that question (don’t ask them to update Alire to work with 8.1) and maybe that might get some discussion on it. It might be worth looking at why they require directx 12 for a command line application. It could be just incidental and not directly intentional (like maybe it’s a dep of another thing they use).
github: GitHub - alire-project/alire: Command-line tool from the Alire project and supporting library
I can’t believe that a Windows user doesn’t know that DirectX is a 3D graphics (and other multimedia) API. I doubt Alire needs it. At least I have never seen it in the requirements. Probably you have a DLL mess on your machine. I would advice you to use Linux for development or reinstall Windows, install DirecX, but I guess, you don’t need these advices. I don’t use Windows and can’t suggest you anything else. Older versions of Alire are available on GibHub.
For a long long time, the direct X runtime was packaged individually with games, so unless you did game development yourself, it would be somewhat unlikely to even know it existed. I know I didn’t run into it until I got a machine with Windows 7 (which is roughly when DirectX11 was introduced) and some games started needing to have their settings adjusted for it (previously to that on my windows XP machine and before, things just worked seamlessly). DirectX10 came out sometime around Vista, but most gamers avoided Vista. It’s not unlikely for someone who uses Windows8 only and doesn’t really game might not be familiar with it.
We also have a lot or recent experience with Raylib here, so it’s a bit more natural for us.
Done, it’s 1805. (fill 20 chars)
I was thinking about this. One alternative while you wait is to build it from source (I did this and it was straight forward using msys2 and following the instructions). Note that you need to pay real close attention to the clone command you make as it has submodules and needs a switch to make it recursively get those (the clone command is in the docs). After that just add the path to your alire executable to your path. I built it with GNAT 12.2 I think, GNAT has since been updated in msys2 but should still work.
That might get around the need for the DLL since you aren’t using the installer application itself. I don’t have Windows 8 (I avoided it like the plague) so I can’t test that myself, but something to try out.