Game saves and settings for Windows

[freddf]

The list is so long to show you that following the rules is not an exception; it's something that most decent applications do. And the applications which break the rules are usually the games.

And there is a very good reason for this, many users (myself included) refuse to have any data from games on system partition, whereas "working" applications can be kept there. I hate games that try to split their data and throw some into user's directory, simply because games usually (wesnoth being an exception) take a lot of space which simply do not have on the system partition. Also changing this would make moving wesnoth between computers a bit more tiresome... so from my very personal perspective is very good as it is now.

I would second Viliam's opinion. "Good behaving" applications are supposed to put their data in "Application Data", whether we like it or not. And the latest version of windows will be enforcing that.
The question is how to distribute this user data. For an ordinary player there is not need to know where the campaign data is, so %APPDATA% is fine. For savegames, if one can assign them to be loaded by Wesnoth on doubleclick, then they can go to "My Documents\My Wesnoth" .
It is more complicated for modders, since for they will need to access to the modding files to. Perhaps it can be solved by making Wesnoth looking for data in this order: %wesnothinstall% -> %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\ApplicationData\Wesnoth -> %APPDATA% -> "My Documents\My Wesnoth". With the later overruling the former.

and "alluserdata" for downloaded content.

I think this one should go to "All users/Application data", if it is downloaded/installed as administrator, and to the local "user data", if downloaded by the user. But it starts to get complicated for the installer script.

As for the polluting the system directory - you can move your whole "Documents and Settings" to an other drive by changing the settings manually in the registry or via numerous toys , such as the official Microsoft's PowerToys. So I think that for the technical user it is not a problem to put the application data where he wants it to be and the way he wants it to be. But the paramount condition for that is that the application behaves exactly as it is described in its documentation with regard of files and directories it uses/creates. So if the [data-directory] switch moves all the used content to this directory it seems fine to me, and even a non technical user should be able to use it.

[zegab]

I'm currently working on this problem. I have 20 computers and much more users in an office-like environment (with centrally stored user profiles), where users have restricted privileges on program and system folders.
This way no games can be saved in the current default directory. I'm looking for a solution that minimizes re-configuration (editing datadir location for 50 users by hand, for example). After finding and reading this topic, I re-considered my first thought, that user data should go to %APPDATA% unconditionally, and I might found a solution that satisfies everybody for now:

If the wesnoth install directory is writeable by the user. then go with that directory, if it isn't, then switch to using %APPDATA%.

Any comments on this?

[Sapient]

I'm currently working on this problem. I have 20 computers and much more users in an office-like environment (with centrally stored user profiles), where users have restricted privileges on program and system folders.
This way no games can be saved in the current default directory. I'm looking for a solution that minimizes re-configuration (editing datadir location for 50 users by hand, for example). After finding and reading this topic, I re-considered my first thought, that user data should go to %APPDATA% unconditionally, and I might found a solution that satisfies everybody for now:

If the wesnoth install directory is writeable by the user. then go with that directory, if it isn't, then switch to using %APPDATA%.

Any comments on this?

If you're going to write this mod for Wesnoth, and I do encourage you to do so, PLEASE DO NOT USE %APPDATA%, instead use the My Documents\My Games\ folder which is more easily accessible to the end users.