Steam gets some things so right....
Shawk
later I'd installed over 20 games (just over 150GB) onto it complete
with all of my settings and savegames... the Steam games
I simply copied the Steamapps folder to a different place, uninstalled
Steam, re-installed it on the new drive and copied the steamapps folder
back to the new folder. Signed in and up and started playing again...
I am not looking forward to re-installing all the non-Steam games
manually, definitely losing all my settings and probably losing all the
savegames...
Tim O
wrote:
Savegames for most new stuff is very easy since they are almost always
in their own folders now, it just varies by game if its in the games
own folder or something like /Users/xxxxxx/MyDocuments, where xxxxxx
is your Windows user name.
When I went from the Windows 7 beta to the full version, I backed up
all my saved games on a DVD and made a little text file that I saved
with them telling the folder the saves went into... This was crucial
to me for games like Fallout 3, since there is no way I'd start that
game over.
Ayatollah of rock 'n' roller
> manually, definitely losing all my settings and probably losing all the
> savegames...
Or you could have took copies of your settings and saved games.
Shawk
They're still sitting on the old drive so I will be doing that... just
wish it was as easy as Steam
Shawk
I will be doing that but I know from experience what a PITA it is..
Mr Rob
wrote:
I must admit that I find the Steam way a lot easier too. I used the
built in back-up feature which worked a charm. I had 24 games
installed and they were all restored fully patched and with all saved
games intact.
I just backed the whole lot up to a slaved drive overnight and then
restored them the next day after reinstalling Windows 7.
--
Rob
Schrodinger
"Shawk" <sh...@gmx.com.3guesses> wrote in message
news:ZKSdnZzgqK5rUqHW...@bt.com...
True. I have dozens of games on Steam, as does my eldest. We are currently
visiting my mum so we just backed up both our Steam folders to an external
hard drive and 20 minutes after landing we have all our games installed.
This would have been a major operation with other games.
Cronos
> Savegames for most new stuff is very easy since they are almost always
> in their own folders now, it just varies by game if its in the games
> own folder or something like /Users/xxxxxx/MyDocuments, where xxxxxx
> is your Windows user name.
That annoys the fuck out of me. One day I unhid the hidden folders and
found one game had made their settings folder hidden in the user shared
folders. Fucking prats!
Cronos
> I must admit that I find the Steam way a lot easier too.
Until you run out of HDD space. All Steam games must be installed to the
Steam folder so can not span multiple HDDs and partitons. Only way
around that would be to use RAID and make a few 2TB HDDs seen as one HDD.
Cronos
> True. I have dozens of games on Steam, as does my eldest. We are currently
> visiting my mum so we just backed up both our Steam folders to an external
> hard drive and 20 minutes after landing we have all our games installed.
Spend time with your mum and not playing your games at her house!
Christian Brandt
Am 01.01.2010 03:36, schrieb Cronos:
> That annoys the fuck out of me. One day I unhid the hidden folders and
> found one game had made their settings folder hidden in the user shared
> folders. Fucking prats!
To make matters worse, many modern games safe their savegames and
settings in %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings which should be only used for
temporary and machine depending data. Recent examples are EVE, Saints
Row 2, Ghostbusters,
If your drive runs full and you order windows to clean up then this data
gets deleted pretty quick. Or if you use roaming profiles, then this
data doesn't get moved, it even gets deleted sometimes when your profile
gets resynced.
This makes four places to look for game Data:
The game directory itself,
%USERPROFILE%\AppData
%USERPROFILE%\My Data
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings
But the good thing, there is a command line option which forces ALL
save games into the game directory itself: /lua:off works with a lot of
programs, right click on the icon or link, select properties, add it to
Target.
Christian Brandt
Elias Fotinis
news:hhjn6t$l7s$5...@news.eternal-september.org...
I'm not familiar with Steam, but can't you just make a junction?
For example, moving the contents of "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps" to
"F:\streamapps" and running this in a Vista/Win7 admin console:
mklink /j "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps" "F:\steamapps"
will allow you to offload the "steamapps" folder to F: while Windows, Steam
and any other app will still access the files correctly as if they were
still in C:\Program Files.
mklink.exe doesn't come with XP, but there are other tools (both from
Microsoft and third parties) like it.
Benedict
"Shawk" <sh...@gmx.com.3guesses> wrote in message
news:ZKSdnZzgqK5rUqHW...@bt.com...
so you manually copied the Steamapps folder to another drive and it took
half an hour - ironically if you'd use Steams' backup feature it would have
taken twice as long!
A few years ago plenty of games used a simple file structure (with savegames
and settings all in the same place) that meant you could copy them from one
drive to another - create a desktop shortcut to the exe - and play them
straight off.
Anssi Saari
> I'm not familiar with Steam, but can't you just make a junction?
Presumably one could also use a dynamic volume which can grow and
shrink as needed and span different drives too. Should be XP Pro, at
least. Accessing those from anything else than Windows may not work
though...
Brad
wrote:
Anyone who needs several terabytes of games installed all at once
needs to seriously get a life. Just get a 1 or 2 TB drive that's
dedicated for gaming, then put all Steam games in D:\steamapps or
whatever.
As far as specific game saves, figure out where they are stored at the
time you're playing the game, and set that folder to automatic backup
to a USB drive. Doing this while you're actively playing the game
will prevent needing to go through dozens and games to figure it out
later.
More and more games are emerging that store the saves in the Steam
cloud which prevents the need entirely.
Christian Brandt
> mklink /j "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps" "F:\steamapps"
Steam can be moved pretty easily to another Hardrive anyway.
Hardlinks/Junctions are still usefull, I prefer the graphical
ntfslink-2.1.exe http://elsdoerfer.name/=ntfslink
It makes often more sense to link single directories below steamapps
instead of the whole steamapps directory because 99,9% of steam sits
within steamapps.
Btw, WindowsXP Pro and better support logical volumes, that is you can
simply "add" space to a partition through the computer management drive
control. You need to convert the drive to a dynamic drive though.
Christian Brandt
Matt v3.3
> When I went from the Windows 7 beta to the full version, I backed up
> all my saved games on a DVD and made a little text file that I saved
> with them telling the folder the saves went into...
I just zip them up with the "full path" option - path gets saved with
the files. Then just unzip to the root drive (G:\ or C:\)
--
};> Matt v3.3 <:{
Unknown
I "format C" quite often, where I keep only my operating system and a
very few essential applications on C. So I can apply C to any of my
PCs. The rest of my drive space consists of a small swap partition
and other drives/partitions for various apps and filing systems, which
I like to keep fairly neat. For easy use and transferability.
I read once, as part of the definition of 'PC', that a PC is a device
used for copying/transfering information. Nothing else. That's all a
CPU/GPU can do.
Right now I'm playing the Brena River Unique Landscape mod for
Oblivion - and I've been constantly installing/re-installing, patching
and backtracking, experimenting with settings trying to avoid crashes
as I enjoy this game. I don't mean that the Brena River mod is the
cause of all this trouble as compared to vanilla Oblivion! It's
because I have quite a few other Oblivion mods running at the same
time and conflicts are unavoidable.
It's easy for me to mirror this file system in any PC, from my backup
DVDs - because, as I said, that's in the very nature of what a PC is.
Of course Oblivion "gets some things right", and every other PC game
"gets some things right". So what's the big deal that Steam "gets
right"? Steam isn't even a GAME. It's a distribution system, a
STORE. It has more in common with Walmart. If I buy a game from
Steam or Walmart, it shouldn't make a fucking bit of difference
regarding how I use my PC, or how I use the product I bought.
Shawk
>
>
> Of course Oblivion "gets some things right", and every other PC game
> "gets some things right". So what's the big deal that Steam "gets
> right"? Steam isn't even a GAME. It's a distribution system, a
> STORE. It has more in common with Walmart. If I buy a game from
> Steam or Walmart, it shouldn't make a fucking bit of difference
> regarding how I use my PC, or how I use the product I bought.
Try reading the first post...