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I need a program installer for Windows that is free or open source, customizable and creates small installer files.

I would be using this to create a mmorpg game client installer for my private server. I will need to make use of this installer repeatedly as soon as my server goes live, to keep my player's software up to date with updates. I have attempted to use NSIS, but I have found it to be rather complicated.

One of my primary concerns is file size.

Any thoughts?

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Try InnoSetup. – s.m Feb 19 '11 at 16:57
Are you using Visual Studio already? If not, then what are your tools and languages for building it? – Job Feb 19 '11 at 17:28
No, this has nothing to do with Visual Studio or any microsoft product. This is for a mmorpg, called KalOnline. I am not programming anything, I am merely tweaking and customizing it, such as changing monsters, item drops, map layouts etc. And those changes can happen in a sporadic time-line, so I need an installer to create a small-highly compressed file. That I can distribute to others... – crosenblum Feb 19 '11 at 17:51
Trying InnoSetup, and so far it's taken a folder with 1.8 gigs into an almost 400mb installer. I was hoping it would create it even smaller than that. – crosenblum Feb 19 '11 at 17:55
That's less than 25% of the original size. IIRC Inno uses lzma as the compressing algorithm. And so does Nullsoft (which is an alternative to Inno), so I don't think you can go much further than that. Try to figure out if there are some unneeded files that you are including by mistake. – s.m Feb 19 '11 at 18:02

closed as not constructive by maple_shaft♦ Mar 31 at 15:11

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