RE: [GD-General] A portable preferences library

[Andrew G. <ag...@cl...>]

Indeed, having all important data in once place really is nice. Now if only
all user preferences in applications was as easy to backup or transfer
between PCs :)

AFAIK under Win98/ME most of the CSIDL stuff still works but goes to either
"\Windows\My Documents" or "Windows\profiles\user\My Documents" if you have
profiles setup. It's something like that but it does work. The other benefit
is that if one day the location of user data should change (as was the case
between NT4->Win2K) then providing your app uses these functions then things
will automagically work.

I do actually remember that game thing you're talking about. From what I
recall a percentage of your drive could be allocated for use with games and
their gamedata/persistent storage. Data from less played games would be
evicted as necessary thus if you didn't play "Super FPS 7" for a few months
then the next time you came to play it then you'd be prompted for the
install disks so it could restore it's data.

HD space is dirt cheap these days though so perhaps it was shelved. Sounds
vaguely like what's offered by the xbox though.

A.





> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Spilman [mailto:to...@pi...] 
> Sent: 04 December 2003 22:59
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: RE: [GD-General] A portable preferences library
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > Behalf Of Andrew Grant
> 
> > The accepted wisdom for the past few years has been for
> > applications to use SHGet*FolderLocation(), it's certainly 
> > something that Microsoft have been advocating since Win2K 
> > started to become mass market and now with every new consumer 
> > system shipping with a varient of XP it's even more important.
> 
> 	For example some slightly popular games GTA3 and GTA3: 
> Vice City place save games into a directory in the current 
> users My Documents folder.  So does the latest Deus Ex 2 
> demo.  And even though I've uninstalled all three I still 
> have my save games in a place where I can find them and 
> decide to keep or delete them.  Also knowing that I can just 
> backup my documents and just re-install my games Is really 
> nice. Better than each end user becoming an expert in 
> different games particular standard for keeping their data.  
> 
> 	About three years ago I remember speaking to some DX 
> guy about a standard they were working on for PC game 
> installs.  Something about using a fixed percentage of the 
> drive for game installs and it automatically managing it.  
> Anyone remember anything about that or was that a crunch mode 
> delusion?
> 
> 	Also where does SHGetSpecialFolderPath( CSIDL_PERSONAL 
> ) ( My Documents ) go on Win98/ME systems?
> 
> 	Tom
> 
>