When a game requires “Microsoft Visual C++ (year)” or “DirectX (number)” to be installed along with the game itself, what are those things and how does the game use them to work?

Question

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

Answer 1

The pace of software development is so fast, and programmers are generally so productive, because they can share and reuse solutions to problems they’ve seen in the past. Any given problem only really needs to be solved once, and everybody after that can just reuse the same solution over and over again. A package of pre-solved problems is called a “library”. (On windows, these are generally, but not always, “.dll” files, which stands for “dynamic link library”).

When you write a program, you don’t have to start at the bottom and build everything yourself. You don’t have to write code to put graphics on the screen, or do physics calculations or other stuff like that, those problems are already solved. Instead, what you do is bring together a bunch of libraries with those things already done. You’ll start with a library of basic fundamental ideas (“Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime”, for example), and you’ll bring in a graphics/gaming library (“DirectX” for example) and a bunch of other things.

When you download a game or install it off a CD, the game will generally come with a lot of the libraries the game requires. However, some libraries are either so common that every system uses them, or otherwise are part of the operating system itself. This is the case for Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime and DirectX: They are so common and so platform-specific, that it’s expected that they already be installed or that they can be installed separately.

Sometimes a game will want to use the most recent version of these libraries to get, for example, better graphics capabilities if possible. Other times you’ll want to stick with a specific version because upgrading will cause a breakage. In either case, it’s usually easier for every individual game to just go out and download the versions they want without having to search around to see if a suitable version already exists.