Force install of DirectX with some games

What's with the fact that some games force you to install DirectX regardless of whether or not it is out of date?

I've known a few games to do this (can't remember all of them) but I have never understood why.

Battlefield 2 is such a game. I just tried installing it to my new PC, the game installed then prompted me to accepted the DX9 licence - there was no bypass option - no option to not install it and if you did try to cancel it then EA (quite smugly) uninstall the game.

I had to go back through the installation (re-doing the CD Key) and then 'End Process' the installer at the point it wanted to install its own version of DirectX over the top of the newer one I have. Killing the installer was the only way I could find to stop it from uninstalling the game at my refusal to allow it to install DX from the game disk.

What is this all about?

What if I want to install Battlefield 2 in a few years time? Do EA expect people to happily overwrite a current DX installation with one that is a few years old?

Anyone care to explain the logic to me - assuming EA have a point to this?

You can't overwrite DX with a newer version so you're worrying about nothing. If a newer version is installed, it just won't do anything.

What Gabriel said.

I guess companies do this because.... how can I put it.... there are just too many dense people in the world who wouldn't install DirectX if they WERE given the choice.

Well, I think they are rotters - I was clever enough to not want to install it, only to be punished by them uninstalling the game.

Anyway, the number of games that force you to do it is low - I'd rather just have the option to not install it if I don't want to. I quite often manually update my DX and don't want someone faffing about with it.

Uninstalling a game you just installed, purely because you chose not to install DX, seems a bit harsh to me.

Personally I think the installer should check before asking, then having it uninstall the game is just wrong.

Even if DX apparantly cannot install over the top of a new version - there is going to be a percentage of people who are going to be nervous when forced to do a *suggested* reinstallation of DX - especially with different versions of DX. I certainly don't want to be forced into choosing an install - I don't mind getting a warning that it is advisable.

It's not just games -- I've run into wayDX is fairly harmless in that it won't let you put an old version on top of a new version... But some business software is even worse:

Quickbooks 2001 (IIRC) insisted in installing IE5, and blows up if you already had IE6.
Or back in the day of Visual Basic (5?) It insisted you should install Internet Explorer 3.02, despite IE 4 on the machine. And if you finally convince it that you REALLY don't want 3.02, it still puts the install icon prominently on the desktop, just in case.

out of all vendors, you'd think that at least Microsoft themselves would bother to check if there happens to be a *newer* version already installed before trying to install the old one...

> out of all vendors, you'd think that at least Microsoft themselves would bother to check if there happens to be a *newer* version


VB5 and 6 had an even bigger pain in the butt, if you had a certain version of office VB would not install the developer version of some controls. Figuring out what was wrong took me a couple of days.

hehe, a hell of a lot of people havent a clue what DX or GL are, and will just assume thats something is broken so publishers decide to not take the risk and force it on you.

Can't blame them really, must save a lot of tech support.

I've actually had problems in the past on my Win95 machine where a particular game (Descent:FreeSpace) - the first one, if you allowed it to install DirectX5 it would do so and screw up the existing install of DirectX if it was higher.

Things have probably changed for the better since then though.

xlsior - I could never work out why I had an Internet Explorer 3.02 install icon on my desktop on my old Win95 box which did nothing each time I reinstalled windows (which in those days was quite frequent).