nsis

It’s no secret that pirates is using NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Installation System) to build the installer.exe file to install the game. You can see that information plain as day when you are installing the game.

The only experience I had before Disney building installers was at Intel. I had used some MS tool to build an installer package for a tool I wrote. It was a pain in the ass. I fought with the damn tool for hours upon hours until it worked correctly.

Fast forward to NSIS. Nullsoft is the company that publishes Winamp. They basically took their installer for Winamp and turned it open source. This means the community benefits since there is a high-powered free tool to build installers and Nullsoft benefits from this since they get free development from the open source community. It’s a win-win.

I was impressed with how fast and simple it is to get up and running with NSIS. During the review/approval process, I was iterating multiple times with my superiors. They finally requested something that I had now idea how to manipulate NSIS to do. I quickly went to the NSIS forum (a sub-forum of the winamp forum) and posted my question. Within 2 minutes I had a response. How’s that for a community. I’m sure it was a noob question, but they still took the time to respond, without flames, and in under 2 minutes.

If you’re building an installer, ditch WISE and InstallShield or whatever else you may be using and at least give NSIS a shot. You will be pleasantly surprised.