RE: [GD-General] A portable preferences library

[Garett B. <gt...@st...>]

// Andrew grant wrote in response to Colin Fahey:
//
// I'd be surprised if your approach makes it through
// QA of any publisher worth their salt.

	Colin's approach is exactly what is used by Quake, Quake2, Quake3,
Half-Life, and by the transitive property, Counter-Strike.  Another popular
game using this technique is Battlefield 1942.

	Personally, I find Colin's suggestion to be a perfectly acceptable means of
managing preferences for a game.  I particularly like the ability to keep a
variety of preference files onhand.  More than one per user can be handy if
you are experimenting with some scripted input behavior in your spare time
but don't want to lose your competition config.

	Now, I'm not sure this is true, but I've heard that Counter-Strike is
currently the most popular online FPS, and that 1942 is second most popular.
And yet you exclude Activision and EA from your set of all "publishers worth
their salt".

// Something that's pretty common these days where
// Dad has to install the games little Johnny wants
// to play on the family PC.

	Ok, this makes me feel a little dumb.  I've been trying to set up a
restricted access user on a Win2k box at work, and no matter what I
disallow, I still can't figure out how to prevent the user from installing
stupid crap from the internet.

	Somehow I doubt there are many fathers who are running serious system-level
multi-user setups at home.  More likely everyone just uses the same login
and shares the same clutter.  Sure, it's still multi-user, as in "used by
multiple people", but not at the registry level.

	So, I'm guessing that the multi-user advantages of the registry-stored
preferences are likely used only by an elite few with some serious IT
skills.  Another example of 99% in, 1% out.  I'm partial to 1942's handy
built-in multiple profiles dialog.  I suppose you could always use a single
registry key to set a default profile for each system-level user.

	Apologies in advance for the rants.

Curious,
Garett