Often when installing a game through a digital storefront, after the game has downloaded and installed, but before rubbing for the first time, it will download various files titled “Visual c++ library 2008” etc, even if previous games have installed them. I suppose the main things I’m wondering are; What are these things, why do the games need them to work, and why aren’t they included in the files Steam/Epic/Uplay downloads when you install the game?
In: Technology
These are code libraries that standardise a lot of generic things for other programmers to use so they can save time and effort not having to do it themselves.
Specifically, C++ Redistributable is a collection of things for running windows applications and doing some more generic things in them. DirectX is graphics library, it has components used for drawing graphics to the screen. Doing so quickly and efficiently isn’t an easy task, it’s very complicated, so it’s not within an average game developer’s skill range, so there are programmers who specialise in graphics to write these libraries so they don’t have to.
The reason applications often come with specific versions is because when something is added or changed in a library that a programmer wants to use they have to use a version that has it. Newer versions will have things the older ones don’t, and older versions might have things that have been changed in the current version and are out of date. So to make sure the user has the right version, they just bundle it in with application. That’s the ‘Redistributable’ part, companies are allowed to distribute them as part of their own applications
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