Re: [email] [GD-General] RE: Gamedevlists-general digest, Vol 1 #284 - 10 msgs

[Dan T. <da...@ar...>]

> > Only if he's an admin(which is the root of so many problems..), and if
he
> > is, he can screw up many more things.
>
> If he can't write to that directory, he can't write a preference file into
> it.
> If he can, he can erase its contents.  As I recall.
> Windows != Unix, there is no "chmod a+t" here.
Right, I have been going with the view that the preferences can't be in the
same directory because of that exact reason.

>
> > > you like, but understand that its your config.
> > That's a fun idea, there. For the adventurous type, you could use the
hash
> > that email uses for binary attachments and shove it all into a human
> > readable xml file. Could get big, though...(MD5, I think?).
> > Might be fun to try out in someone's small puzzle type game. oo, oo...
if
> you
> > wanted real fun you could Zip the xml, so humans who wanted to read it
> > would just WinZip it and life would be good. Hmmmm..
>
> I'm not quite sure what you are getting at here.  I'm envisioning that
> instead of having a readily visible Quake.app icon, I have Jeffs Quake and
> Paulines Quake icons - double-clicking those load up Quake.app and
pre-load
> my, or her, preferences and thus open the correct save games, mouse
> settings, etc.
>
> The application would install, by default, a "New User" icon which you can
> either double-click (and it magically detects that you are requesting that
a
> new set of user prefs be created), or perhaps you just duplicate it and
> rename it.
That's what I was getting at. The icon itself holds the preferences and you
use file associations so your program opens with them, and unzips them, and
parses the xml, etc. I was just going off on the ability to shove
*everything* into the one file and still have it human readable.

> > > The truly innovative could, however, write a tiny app that functioned
as
> a
> > > LAUNCHER, that stored the preferences back into itself as resources,
and
> > > passed values on perhaps through environment variables, a command-line
> > > option or a temporary file.
> > That'd be a fun SourceForge project I bet.
>
> To my eye, it'd be a few days work to do the whole thing, given that the
> launcher only has to:
>
> a) load and run another application
>
> Since the registry probably has your install directory anyway, its a
> registry read, and a ShellExecute()
>
> b) act as a REPOSITORY for preferences
>
> You'd probably do this by having the launcher app have a few documented
> entry points that could be accessed via LoadLibrary().
Ah, I was thnking of a more transparent solution, which would be more
difficult to implement, I'd say. Yours is probably better.

-Dan