Making things a little more newbie-user-friendly.

[parjlarsson]

I find out about the game.
I go to the site.
I finally see a link to "Download" (there really should be a huge button up top saying "Download the game for free for PC, Mac, Linux, whatever ...HERE."
I find the Mac OS X "stable" release build down a ways on the page.
I download.
Crash. Nothing works.
I go the wiki part about Macs. "Compile for Mac."
I think "compile" means putting a game together after you download but I'm not really sure and it seems pretty complicated.
I go to forums and figure out somewhere in a thread that I should be using a "dev" build.
I download that. It has a readme file that says go to the site.
It works.
Tons of keyboard commands aren't explained. There's no tutorial taking you through how to play or figure it out.
The readme just points to a website I already visited.


Suggestions:
1. Make the initial download link point to the build that you want people to use when they don't know how to do complicated computer stuff.
2. Just a basic list of keyboard commands in the readme file.
3. Basic list of little idiosyncracies like having to close a door and re-open it before you can get another person through.

[parjlarsson]

http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Compile_for_Mac looks like a great page for someone who wants to play the game on a Mac.

Yet:
1. No explanation of what a disc image is or why or why not you'd want to build that instead of a "non-universal binary".
2. Unclear directions (see the Discussion).
3. No explanation for why you'd want to do all this rather than just download the part from the "Download for Mac" link on the Downloads page (which didn't work for me, so it's kind of obvious, but having it spelled out might be good).

[blue_cephalopod]

You have a point. I have an intel imac running on osx 10.4. Haven´t had any luck getting it to run, compile, install, etc. I asked some questions and got some response but it didn´t help. Maybe try the irc channel. I spent many hours , learned a bit , but i don´t understand what do do with the CFLAGS or LDLFLAGS stuff. So I have pretty much given up for now. It´s a shame because I´ve played earlier versions on PC and enjoyed it a lot. I hope someone else has the same problem and finds the solution, or they make a truly universal installer or something, but I don´t have the will to find out myself.

[parjlarsson]

http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=5936.0

try option B in that thread, but also note the date that each of those files were updated

last I checked the Mac 2.4 dev version was way older than the other. It worked for me, though, after 0-5 crashes on start up it almost always works flawlessly once it gets going.

[derpsperm]

Please just put a link up to let me play the game. If you can't do that take the current links down. I have a mac full of crap as it is. As OP said needs to be noob friendly just a simple click and go.