[quake3] Re: Videos not found :[

[monk at rq3.com]

Bah, again apologies for the long mail.

I don't use multi-user stuff too often.  I always thought that looking for
my junk in a *nix system was an exercise in pain and futility and could
never find the logic of some applications being in /etc/home/sys as
opposed to /home/etc/sys or whatever.  I guess there is some type of
esoteric logic (all the web stuff will be in /etc/home/www/html of
course!) but I never really figured out what it was nor did I want to
learn the differences between Irix, SunOS, and whatever flavor of Linux
did its own, slightly different, thing.

That being said, I was always used to Quake 2 and Quake 3 putting their
stuff in the c:\quake3 folder.  Or c:\program files\quake3, etc.  I knew
that no matter what, I could always look there to see what PK3s,
screenshots, demos, and mods I had.  That sucker was self-contained.  If I
needed to copy this stuff to a new computer, I could just copy the folder
and BOOM, no jerking around with stuff except redoing the video settings
and mouse sensitivity.

So... what changed?  Quake 3 on windows didn't seem to use this per-user
stuff.  Do gamers tend to have multiuser machines?  Most of the ones I
know tend to have one gamer per machine or even one gamer for a few
machines.

Heck, dorking around with the ol' MacOS Classic version of Q3, it seemed
to put stuff in one place?  Then when it moved over to OS X it decided it
was time to jam crap in other places.  And it still, for some reason,
didn't consistently save or read my mods' configs, though I don't know if
that's an ioq3 or a baseq3 issue.

Is this a big issue for windows gamers?  Are people really unhappy that
the old Q3 doesn't support per-user splitting of data and mods and
whatever?  Or is this some *nix way of thinking that is being shoehorned
into the windows world to solve a problem that doesn't exist for that
platform?

The discussion for windows stuff seems to be, "put it here, no put it
there, wait, where do these things go now?"  Why not leave the stuff where
it is?

As a windows user, I've been trained that my programs go in c:\program
files\APPLICATION\ or into wherever I installed it, like e:\quake3\
instead.  And all of those supporting files go into THAT FOLDER. 
Screenshots, demos, mods.  Now I admit I'm not up on the latest games, but
I remember when people were unhappy with applications that littered all
their supporting files all over the place.  That's one of the current
complaints with Google Desktop for Mac, isn't it?

Has there been a big shift from the ideal of "all in one place, easy to
find" paradigm to "hide data like the easter bunny!"?  Now bear in mind,
my whining is windows-centric.  The "put stuff all over per-user" thing is
long established in *nix since, hell, it's designed that way.  But I
always run my windows boxes as a single user.  The OS seems very
single-user centric and the multiple user aspect of it feels tacked on and
inelegant.  Just my personal feelings.

But the gist of this mail is that I don't see multi-user support as a big
need on windows and changing the current q3 behavior to make it multi-user
seems like it'd jack up a ton of users.  Trying to discern the current de
facto place for putting things seems like more of a justification for
changing things rather than a solid reason for changing the behavior of q3
on windows.  I don't know if it would be possible to detect the OS and
default to the old behavior on windows, toggleable with a cvar for those
who really do want the change, and default to the new?(current?) behavior
on *nix and OS X.

It's just that the change in general seems arbitrary to me.  If some
people want this behavior on windows, ok, cool, it'd be neat as an OPTION.
 But making it the default behavior seems like it'd only set you up for
frustrated end-users spamming you with emails telling you that the
screenshot and video functions of ioq3 are broken since they can't find
'em.  And we all know how well RTFM works with people, so I can't see that
really working too well as a way to mitigate the pain.

Just my two cents.  *My* typical use of ioq3 would be for a base engine to
build something else off of, so I could get that behavior tweaked, but I
know many people view ioq3 as a straight q3 replacement and, while they
will expect improvements, I don't think they will expect a behavior change
that large.  And moving that kinda stuff around (to a hidden folder, no
less!) is a pretty big change.  Yes, you can put a shortcut to the
appropriate folder during install, but if gamers are like me, they'll just
drag the ioq3 icon to the desktop one time and then subsequently
completely forget there's any programs entry for ioq3.

I don't know if ioq3's been this way for many months on windows since I
don't use it except as part of something else, not a standalone
replacement, but I know that shift from the "Quake 3" folder to
"USERNAME\quake3\whatever" on OS X pissed the 'ell outta me because I
couldn't find things and didn't know where Q3 was pulling .cfg info from
and I think that wasn't even ioq3, that was going from the classic OS app
to the id OS X app.

Monk.