String Safety

[mankrip]

Nice ideas mh, and would actually be useful for playing the game from read-only places like network folders or CD/DVD-ROMs.

[Sajt]

It keeps changing. It's either AppData, or My Documents, or My Games, or My Documents/My Games, or Local Settings/AppData, ...

I think you are supposed to put "hidden" cache-like stuff (the same sort of thing as GLQuake's ms2 files, for example), in AppData, and put the user-config stuff (screenshots, saves, config) in My Games.

That's why you should use SHGetFolderPath - you don't need to worry about that stuff if you just do it the right way.

I wasn't talking about how to get the paths, I was talking about the stupid amount of paths that games have used, and which paths should be used for which things.

Also, I don't remember SHGetFolderPath having My Games, for example. I guess you can append "My Games", but what if Windows 8 renames it to "My Gamezz" or something?

[revelator]

aye has changed a fair bit over the last few windowses.

like 7 does it seems to be the final way i think, it even stores msys and cygwin data paths in the windows user folders now.

vista did also but screwed up a fair bit sometimes i havent had any problems with that on 7.

well besides my gfx card crashing (not related)

[Baker]

That's why you should use SHGetFolderPath - you don't need to worry about that stuff if you just do it the right way.

Old thread, thread title drifted ... but really great thread.

Anyways ... I'm thinking about Windows and sweating over this.

DarkPlaces made Spirit upset by using a "single place" to store config, making Retroblazer fight DarkPlaces Quake. Which is wrong.

If I do the above or go for the registry, I'm interfering with the ability of 2 separate "installations" operating separately.

Ugh.

Nothing in the engine should write outside of the Quake folder, period.

Winner.

(Yeah I needed to think everything through to be certain. In a way, I don't like writing to "Program Files" and it is sort of worse that you really aren't writing to "Program Files" in Window 7/8/Vista. Still the other options suck and get away from the "Sheesh can I just copy my Quake folder and not worry about 50 other places and my registry to find all my files".

Simple > Complex)

[Spirit]

DarkPlaces made Spirit upset by using a "single place" to store config, making Retroblazer fight DarkPlaces Quake.

Iirc the problem was that the Retroblazer developer did blindly use id1 for his game directory. Not sure, I died in the maze map and never once looked back at the game.

[mh]

I've a -multiuser command-line option in my current code that will use the user profile directory instead of the Quake directory (just a COM_AddGameDirectory of the relevant profile path so it also allows per-user content override). In the years since I've come to see both sides of the argument - yes, multiple Quake installs needs to be supported, but also - yes, you need to support cases where more than one person uses the same machine. I wouldn't like to get someone else's config or save games, so it's nice to have this escape hatch. The default behaviour is unchanged, of course.

[leileilol]

FYI SHGetFolderPath will kill Win9X support

but i'll mention KernelEx does an 'emulation' of it by having a My Documents folder in the C:\ root for that

[mh]

I killed Win9x support a loooooooooong time ago. Happy days.

[revelator]

it does have its uses to have an old dedicated PC with win9x sadly you will run into some hurdles nowadays if you try a fresh install of say win98 SE as there are no updates avaliable from windows update anymore (site just keeps refreshing).
so to have the fixes that came later on you should have backed up the windows updates. kernelex is neat allows me to run software developed for later versions of windows on 98.

[mh]

Drivers are a big problem. Old hardware dies and new hardware doesn't get Win 9x drivers. A VM helps a lot, but they're dropping support too. Plus it was a crap OS to begin with (I usually used NT4 back in those days unless I really encountered something that just wouldn't run on it - which was rare enough but did occasionally happen. As soon as Win2k was released I threw it out and never looked back). Not working on Win9x is a pretty piss-poor excuse to not do something IMO; unless you know for an absolute fact that you're targetting and that you have to target an incredibly explicit and very small user base you're wasting your time and compromising your program on account of a 17-year-old OS that only die-hard hold-outs and nostalgia buffs still use. Neither are in my target user base.

[mankrip]

Really good points. Sometimes I think about that kind of stuff in regards to the software renderer.

[revelator]

id prefered NT4 also but there where edge cases like directx. NT4 only supported version 3 and could only be upgraded by using hacks and only to version 6, opengl worked a treat though.
and it costed an arm and a a leg back then .
i also changed to 2000 when it came out, but occasionally i had to use win98se for some games and programs. with XP i ditched win98se completely.

[leileilol]

I run Win9x because I have some hardware and games that don't run on NT at all and I often don't have space to dual-boot Windows 2000 on the old hardware.
I maintain 9x boxes for testing and gaming reasons (Dosbox isn't perfect), and developing Quake stuff on a ludicrously ludicrous computer isn't much of an offering for performance profiling

if you think Win95 is bad, at least it's not the psp

[Baker]

I run Win9x because I have some hardware and games that don't run on NT at all and I often don't have space to dual-boot Windows 2000 on the old hardware.

A few times I went to Media Play (which went out of business) and bought several hundred $$$ worth of games after Christmas with the games heavily discounted. I had a Win 98 machine until about 2004. Sadly, maybe 2/3 of those games do not work on Win XP or later. Unsurprisingly, I haven't played most of those games in quite a while.

if you think Win95 is bad, at least it's not the psp

Didn't Win95 run on 8MB machines? The PSP has at least 32 MB. I'm just saying. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with liking a PSP, although the demographics are far younger than any other platform. Which comes with an equally "unadjusted to reality mindset followed with unimaginative ideas and unrealistic expectations."

And I do have to say, in the age of iPhones, Android and iPads and iPod Touch ... with the mobile competition having a minimum OpenGL ES 1.1 and liberal "app store policies" versus Sony's control-freak "we have to like your idea for your game to even have a chance" makes the PSP a bit unappetizing compared to mobile platforms with far more generous specs.

Based on my understanding of history, I do not believe the Playstation Vita is going to viable.

Phones will rule this upcoming era. There will not be room for "portable" non-phones. Sony and Nintendo are going to die (in the portable market).

This is assuming that government (probably Europe) doesn't gaze with an evil eye looking at the phone market and asking the hard questions. Apple had the foresight to see way back in 2004 that the phone market was "everything" and Google seeing this came up with the Android platform that allowed big-time carriers to have a high quality OS on the cheap with the level of control they want.

But until the evils of phone market tie-in are realized by governmental entities, I do think Sony and Nintendo are going to crash and burn in the mobile market. Sony is a colossus, they'll be able to weather through 10 years of failed ambitions (it'll be less than that). Nintendo may not have that kind of luxury.

[mankrip]

Sony has the Xperia Play, which is already setting some standards for Android gaming, so they're not going to lose all of the portable market easily. If the hardcore handheld gaming market dies, they'll still survive in the mobile phone gaming market.