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.
<br><br>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.<br><br>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.
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:monk@rq3.com">monk@rq3.com</a></b> <<a href="mailto:monk@rq3.com">monk@rq3.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Bah, again apologies for the long mail.<br><br>I don't use multi-user stuff too often. I always thought that looking for<br>my junk in a *nix system was an exercise in pain and futility and could<br>never find the logic of some applications being in /etc/home/sys as
<br>opposed to /home/etc/sys or whatever. I guess there is some type of<br>esoteric logic (all the web stuff will be in /etc/home/www/html of<br>course!) but I never really figured out what it was nor did I want to<br>learn the differences between Irix, SunOS, and whatever flavor of Linux
<br>did its own, slightly different, thing.<br><br>That being said, I was always used to Quake 2 and Quake 3 putting their<br>stuff in the c:\quake3 folder. Or c:\program files\quake3, etc. I knew<br>that no matter what, I could always look there to see what PK3s,
<br>screenshots, demos, and mods I had. That sucker was self-contained. If I<br>needed to copy this stuff to a new computer, I could just copy the folder<br>and BOOM, no jerking around with stuff except redoing the video settings
<br>and mouse sensitivity.<br><br>So... what changed? Quake 3 on windows didn't seem to use this per-user<br>stuff. Do gamers tend to have multiuser machines? Most of the ones I<br>know tend to have one gamer per machine or even one gamer for a few
<br>machines.<br><br>Heck, dorking around with the ol' MacOS Classic version of Q3, it seemed<br>to put stuff in one place? Then when it moved over to OS X it decided it<br>was time to jam crap in other places. And it still, for some reason,
<br>didn't consistently save or read my mods' configs, though I don't know if<br>that's an ioq3 or a baseq3 issue.<br><br>Is this a big issue for windows gamers? Are people really unhappy that<br>the old Q3 doesn't support per-user splitting of data and mods and
<br>whatever? Or is this some *nix way of thinking that is being shoehorned<br>into the windows world to solve a problem that doesn't exist for that<br>platform?<br><br>The discussion for windows stuff seems to be, "put it here, no put it
<br>there, wait, where do these things go now?" Why not leave the stuff where<br>it is?<br><br>As a windows user, I've been trained that my programs go in c:\program<br>files\APPLICATION\ or into wherever I installed it, like e:\quake3\
<br>instead. And all of those supporting files go into THAT FOLDER.<br>Screenshots, demos, mods. Now I admit I'm not up on the latest games, but<br>I remember when people were unhappy with applications that littered all
<br>their supporting files all over the place. That's one of the current<br>complaints with Google Desktop for Mac, isn't it?<br><br>Has there been a big shift from the ideal of "all in one place, easy to<br>
find" paradigm to "hide data like the easter bunny!"? Now bear in mind,<br>my whining is windows-centric. The "put stuff all over per-user" thing is<br>long established in *nix since, hell, it's designed that way. But I
<br>always run my windows boxes as a single user. The OS seems very<br>single-user centric and the multiple user aspect of it feels tacked on and<br>inelegant. Just my personal feelings.<br><br>But the gist of this mail is that I don't see multi-user support as a big
<br>need on windows and changing the current q3 behavior to make it multi-user<br>seems like it'd jack up a ton of users. Trying to discern the current de<br>facto place for putting things seems like more of a justification for
<br>changing things rather than a solid reason for changing the behavior of q3<br>on windows. I don't know if it would be possible to detect the OS and<br>default to the old behavior on windows, toggleable with a cvar for those
<br>who really do want the change, and default to the new?(current?) behavior<br>on *nix and OS X.<br><br>It's just that the change in general seems arbitrary to me. If some<br>people want this behavior on windows, ok, cool, it'd be neat as an OPTION.
<br> But making it the default behavior seems like it'd only set you up for<br>frustrated end-users spamming you with emails telling you that the<br>screenshot and video functions of ioq3 are broken since they can't find
<br>'em. And we all know how well RTFM works with people, so I can't see that<br>really working too well as a way to mitigate the pain.<br><br>Just my two cents. *My* typical use of ioq3 would be for a base engine to
<br>build something else off of, so I could get that behavior tweaked, but I<br>know many people view ioq3 as a straight q3 replacement and, while they<br>will expect improvements, I don't think they will expect a behavior change
<br>that large. And moving that kinda stuff around (to a hidden folder, no<br>less!) is a pretty big change. Yes, you can put a shortcut to the<br>appropriate folder during install, but if gamers are like me, they'll just
<br>drag the ioq3 icon to the desktop one time and then subsequently<br>completely forget there's any programs entry for ioq3.<br><br>I don't know if ioq3's been this way for many months on windows since I<br>
don't use it except as part of something else, not a standalone<br>replacement, but I know that shift from the "Quake 3" folder to<br>"USERNAME\quake3\whatever" on OS X pissed the 'ell outta me because I
<br>couldn't find things and didn't know where Q3 was pulling .cfg info from<br>and I think that wasn't even ioq3, that was going from the classic OS app<br>to the id OS X app.<br><br>Monk.<br><br>---<br>To unsubscribe, send a blank email to
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