Molebox dead? (and other Qs)

Does anyone know if molebox is dead?

(Last release is from september 2008, and last official posts on their forums are about that old also.)

I tried to contact them in the in the middle of this week with a simple sales question and they haven't come back to me wit an answer yet. This is imho worrying. If a salesman cannot even help me with the purchase/sales info I don't want to even imagine the pain that will be, when i need some support post purchase.

But anyway I wanted to throw out the question here in case someone knows:

When (If) I buy a Molebox(/Pro) license is this license for one version only or for any future updates?

I at least got several updates with my license, didn't pay any extra for updates... it's been a while since last update though.

Its being replaced with a Superior product called Steelhide.

I've been using molebox for years and indeed they updated a few niggles I had with BlitzMax packing.

Although it hasnt been updated for a while I have no outstanding issues with it.

I don't know where you're looking, but there has been six updates to Molebox since September 2008 - the most recent one being 15th January 2009 (four days ago). Version number is 2.3641.

They stopped sending out updates by email years ago. If you want updates now then you need to download them manually from the molebox website.

Thank you all for the answers so far.

@GfK: I wasn't looking to good, I'm afraid. Sorry.

http://www.molebox.com/download.shtml says:

Last version: 2.3640, released on December 15, 2008

But I guess that is the date of the demo version. The registered customers probably got a newer version available i guess based on your post.


@OvineByDesign: SteelHide is in the making right now? Or is it a released product?

I.e. is it worth waiting for, you think?

If molebox pro is alive and well and it works great with Blitz3D I think it might very well cover my needs. I did a testrun (with molebox pro demo) with one of my own projects and made an external package of all the media in the subdirectories and it worked like charm as far as i could see.



While I'm at it I got more questions :)

* Have you ever run into problems with extensions/Userlibs? I'm using the fastlibs-extensions and SQLite wrapper for instance. (I mean when an extension is using file-access of their own)

* Have you ever had any problem with mixing files? What I mean is that some media-files are packed by molebox and then some other files are lying in the folder as usual. I was thinking about having the SQLite database external to the molebox .PAK-file. Has similar setups ever given you a headache?

* I saw that molebox writes "DLL-stubs" to the disc to do its work. Does it place them in the specified TEMP directory of the system. I'd like my programs to be able to run on windows (2000/Vista/XP) in user mode (and not necessarily in admin mode). Does this work?

edit: formatting/spelling

One usability limitation of Molebox that I remember running into (not sure if it has been resolved at some point over the past 2 years or so), is that when I tried to follow a download link to a moleboxed .exe and choose the 'run' option from within Internet Explorer, the program would fail with a read-error.

If I chose 'save to disk' and run the downloaded exe all was fine.

I have ordered and got my confirmation of the payment of MoleBox Pro now, so I'm waiting for the registration info in the mail.

I think this program might be useful in bundling more of my personal programs than my (toyish-) Blitz3D projects =)

Not all DLLs' can be moleboxed.

Saying that the only 1 I have found was BASS.DLL which needs to be an external file.

@xlsior -- Moleboxed executables cant be run direct from a ZIP file or from the net. Common email I get from users not extracting the exe form the ZIP file.

@Mahan -- You cant go far wrong with Molebox.

I was thinking about using an installer for my game(s) anyway. For instance http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page (Nullsoft installer). The main reason I went for the Pro version of Molebox is the capability to create external package-files (and also patch-files) so I'll still have more than a single .exe-file to deliver to my users.

The patch system works great for the media, you still have to issue a new EXE if that changes tho.

Installers are ok- but alot of users hate the use of them.