[Coolsvilleman]

Everyone knows how to share drives in windows but I was wondering if this can be extended in such a way that users could log into the drive and only update specific files. for example lets say you and your brother wants to play a game, you both install it but it takes up alot of room so you install it to one computer only. but when you try to run the game from that one computer over the network your settings files keep overwriting eachother and problems ensue. I am wondering if there is a program where you can do the same thing but each user has his or her own login which means when you try to write to a file it instead makes a copy of the file you wish to overwrite and updates it only for that user (say a settings file) but does not touch the original file so other users can still access them or change them to fit there own settings. Has anyone ever heard of a program that can do this or a setting that can be changed? It would greatly reduce redundancy for my comptuers at how with programs files music etc.

 

[FLaRe85]

They're called NTFS ACLs (will solve your overwriting 'problem') and I can guarentee that you'll find no such program that will do what you're asking. You essentially want to offer different files in the same location, determined by the user logged in. The closest thing you'll be able to accomplish is rewriting the location of the dir in that user's profile or possibly using an NTFS junction point, though the latter is applied at the filesystem level and thus applies to every user account.

Really, the responsiblity of such a thing lies in the configuration options of the game. When accessing it over the share, it still downloads the executables and runs them locally, so any registry changes are being applied to the local machine. Check if there's some kind of registry hack or command line option you can perform to specify the location of the save files and simply store those locally rather than over the network.

 

[Coolsvilleman]

ok i understand what your saying and i also know that they are loaded locally into memory and run but im talking games that dont use registry to save settings. as well this would apply to alot of other things besides games such as music archives or documents.
for example
would it even be possible to redirect the system so that when it tried to write
c:\game\settings.ini

it instead copied the file to

c:\user\game\settings.ini

and then wrote to it. now every time it was asked to be read or written to again it would instead return

c:\user\game\settings.ini
for the settings file and

c:\game\(other files)
for any other file

all i want to do is trick the system even if it has to be done using a virtual drive or mapped drive or whatnot.

 

[KillerShots]

Generally, there are no such utilities.

Such a feature could easily be added to a game by the developers by writing to %user/whatever. This is common practice in the Unix world (where the user is not allowed to touch the game itself, just to read it). In that case, it would go to ~/whatever - ~/ being the user's directory, with the game being located elsewhere.

Like I said, the feature exists under Windows... but Windows developers either don't know how to use it or are too lazy to use it.

Interesting that unix ports of windows games all write their user-specific data to the user's directories (doom 3, nwn, ut2004).