RE: [GD-General] A portable preferences library

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

And hey, Doom also stored it's config file in the game directory so that's
another mass seller which counters my opinion!

But for arguments sake lets get rid of all those games released before the
year 2000 when your average PC came with 98/SE/ME... which leaves BF1942.
I'm not sure what relevance it being a popular online game has, while it's a
fantastic game I don't think it's sales were anything remarkable.

Anyhow, as someone pointed out there are games out there which require admin
privileges to play but more and more are switching to using the correct
location for this sort of thing. Unless you haven't looked lately then XP
now comes packaged with pretty much any PC and Microsoft are really pushing
the muti-user angle since it's the first OS targetted at the home market
which has good support for this. People who think they know better might
disagree with this usage scenario, but when Microsoft pushes an aspect or
usage pattern it more often than not becomes adopted (I used to hate 'My
Documents' when it was first introduced, but I use it now).

Anyhow, you are of course free to do whatever you want, but my advice to
anyone thinking of releasing a PC game in the future would be to follow the
recommended approach and install all per-user options in the correnct
location. Even if everyone using a PC has a single login then the worse that
happens is their saves are stored with all similar data and can easily be
backed up.

_____________________________________
andrew grant | programmer | climax brighton
ag...@cl... - www.climax.co.uk








> -----Original Message-----
> From: Garett Bass [mailto:gt...@st...] 
> Sent: 05 December 2003 03:09
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: RE: [GD-General] A portable preferences library
> 
> 
> // 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
> 
>