Echelon9, on 05 February 2012 - 06:42 AM, said:
Sorry, but I really don't like the idea of using ~/Documents on Mac as the file path location of saved games and screenshots. It just doesn't tie into the way any other (broad statement: but I haven't seen any examples) games or Mac apps utilise the file system.
The advantage of having screenshots in a hidden folder would be...?
If it was so important to Apple that apps use Application Support for *all* data, they shouldn't hide it by default, now they are forcing us to consider alternatives. Also if we were writing a native Mac app, I would agree, we would use the standard file open/save UI. But we're not going to have an OS-specific UI in game AFAIK, the path will be chosen by the game but it's the user who takes the action to create the file. Saved games is a debate worth having, but if there's no strong resistance to having them in My Documents on Windows, then I don't see the problem on OS X either. We can't pretend "OS X users don't care about paths but Windows users do" because that's a false statement.
Everyone can have a
preference about this, which is why something like what Yves suggests might work.
Yves, on 05 February 2012 - 10:18 AM, said:
It's good to see some progress, but it's also frustrating that you have done the same thing I've worked on the last two weekends and was close to getting a patch too.
One purpose of this thread and the Wiki article was to avoid such a situation.
I said I'd do this task and also updated the wiki article accordingly in
this post.
Oh. I think I did read that post, but interpreted it as working on bundle stuff, my patch doesn't have anything to do with bundles. Also I looked on Trac and didn't see a ticket and there was little activity on the forum or IRC, so I just started working on it. I wasn't trying to duplicate effort or step on toes. I don't think our work is totally incompatible, and also it was good to get some experience with Cocoa and Objective-C++ (and I discovered some unrelated bugs meanwhile)
I mostly started working on it because I knew it would only take a few days, and then we would have code to discuss what's right or wrong, like we are now so I guess it worked

No need to throw away what you've been working on.
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Game data root:
Your patch doesn't change the behaviour as specified in the table. However, it's still possible to define INSTALLED_DATADIR to make it work in a bundle.
INSTALLED_DATADIR should be an absolute path, so that doesn't sound like a good idea for bundles which are portable by nature. The paths I changed have nothing to do with bundles, but will be the same for SVN vs. releases.
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My approach was doing some basic validation of the paths at runtime which is checking if the directory exists in this case. If it doesn't exist, the default directory executable_path/../data/ is used.
However the question is if this path is even needed at all if we can have separate paths for its subdirectories (like mods).
I don't understand. Can't we just use
CFBundleGetMainBundle or something to see if we're a bundle or not and go with that? I haven't tried it to know if it works reliably (we could also check if there's a .app in the path as an additional validation, which is an "ugly" hack we use somewhere else, but it might work). My feeling is we should use it anyway to get bundle info, like the bundle name, so we can set the paths accordingly (e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/BundleName/). If I'm not mistaken, the VFS already checks if full paths exist or not and creates them accordingly, of course that doesn't help reading the root game data if it's missing, but that's something either the engine (with simple logic) or the installer should get right, rather than being left to user decisions or compile-time options.
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Mod-paths:
I've had a quick discussion with Philip about this topic but didn't update the wiki-article.
We sorted out that we currently have at least three kinds of mod-directories.
1. Deployedmod: Usually public.zip which contains the "default mod" we deploy with the game.
2. mods: the directory containing all other mods.
3. usermod: the directory where atlas saves maps etc...
(4. downloadedmods) there's another potential directory for automatically downloaded mods... but current it should be sufficient to just have "mods" instead.
The reason to have a separate "Deployedmod" directory is to allow us including it in a simple app-bundle.
We can't have the mods-directory in the app bundle.
Yeah, my patch doesn't do anything about mods, and honestly the VFS is in such a state currently that it's not even worth thinking of multiple mods IMO (in fact I recall recent discussions about only allowing a single mod to be mounted as a simplifying case). But if we do, all that needs to happen is, for example: (1) is already mounted in VFS root (readonly), (2)/(4) m_GameData / "mods"/* get mounted in VFS root (readonly), and (3) m_UserData / "mods"/* get mounted in VFS root with read/write permission. Am I missing something?
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Directory validation:
That's another problem I tried solving with my path. Currently the game just crashes in most cases if some required directories don't meet the requirements (don't exist, wrong permissions etc...).
Permissions is a tricky issue and one we try to avoid so far, but it's easy to fix in this case. With sensible locations for all the game's data, there's no need to worry about permissions, because the current user will have full permission for their home directory (where all the runtime data should be created) and read permission elsewhere. And there's no need to worry about whether they exist, because if they are writable runtime data paths, then the VFS will create them for us. The only thing that absolutely has to exist in advance and be readable is the data and binaries bundled with the game, in which cases are these missing or not accessible?
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I don't know if this approach is better and I can't provide a patch yet because it's not yet working.
Now it probably doesn't make sense working on it as you already have a working patch.
It's always worth working on something if it can be done better, because nobody has exclusive rights to change a part of the game's source code
Ykkrosh, on 05 February 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:
I think the important goal is that building the game should be easy and automatic, not that it should be fast. For first-time developers, the time-consuming part will be downloading the game's code and data, and waiting extra tens of minutes for building won't be a major issue. For repeat developers, they'll only need to rebuild the libraries every few months when changes are made, so slowness won't matter.
That would simplify things quite a bit, right now the simplest case is downloading libraries/osx from SVN, and running the single ./rebuild-libraries.sh script, which downloads, builds, and installs everything, or we can choose to provide the source tarballs, but then it could be argued that doesn't help much because it adds to SVN checkout/update time and doesn't reduce build time, but does increase maintenance.