 | | | Apple and Gaming | Apple and Gaming 2007-11-22 - By Andrew White
Back
Aaron Fothergill wrote:
> game developers preference to do stuff
> that you really shouldn't do (like saving the game's settings and
> save games in the same folder as the game itself)
Sorry to hijack on this one, but:
As a user, if I wanted to pick one petty thing that game writers do
that really irritates me, it's writing into /Applications. Please,
please, please: do not assume a connection between the game source
and any generated files. This is bad for multiple reasons:
* If I have multiple users, I explicitly want the games for each user
to be "sandboxed", so to speak. What I do on my account should *NOT*
interact with what my wife does on her account, even if we share a
"program".
* I expect that if I back up my home directory, I've backed up all
"working data". I don't need programs finding new and interesting
places to hide data, especially in "read only" directories.
* I should not have to go and manually edit permissions in /
Applications to make stuff writeable by unprivileged users just so
that they can run a program.
I realise some Windows ports do this, and that it's easier to just
port if you break the above rules. What you should realise is that I
will be muttering under my breath, cursing you and your laziness and
the fact I'm having to hack and manually rebuild the system security
model just to allow my daughter to play my game without risking
corrupting my computer. Your laziness is NOT more valuable to me
than an easy and secure system.
The only "difficult" scenario are games that actively encourage
direct install of user created content (eg Neverwinter Nights). The
first option is to figure whether you really *must* have this stuff
installed globally only - many things that games expect to be
installed in their App tree could equally well be installed per-user
in ~/Library, or failing that into /Library/Application Support for
stuff that must be shared.
--
Andrew White
__ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Mac-games-dev mailing list (Mac-games-dev@(protected))
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/mac-games-dev/junlu%405341.com
This email sent to junlu@(protected)
|
|
|