[quake3] Re: Videos not found :[

Henry Garcia defsyn at gmail.com
Mon Sep 17 19:59:20 EDT 2007


The main issue is security. In the *nix world, as you put it, your user data
is stored in the home folder of the current user: ~/.q3a/q3config.cfg, etc.
In the old windows world, games put things in folders which really should
only have administrative privileges. Same with Mac Classic.

Windows and Mac didn't change to be a pain in the neck. They changed because
of the jerks who like to hack everybody's system.

Windows and Mac have grown up having learned that the world is not
necessarily a friendly place: not every folder is a safe place to allow
programs to store data. Protect your system.

On 9/17/07, monk at rq3.com <monk at rq3.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
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