Posted by
| Nick Gammon
Australia (22,973 posts) bio
Forum Administrator |
Message
| I was trying to set up MUSHclient to run under Vista for my daughter, so she could try playing a MUD or two.
Now, it *did* install and run, so I suppose you could say it worked as advertised.
But, when I tried to do fancier things, like download and install plugins, that was when Vista and I got into a bit of a brawl.
For a start, I can't download a plugin and save into the worlds -> plugins folder as that is write-protected (apparently) unless you are doing an installation. So, I saved the plugins into My Documents. Then the plugin wouldn't work because there was not "state" directory under My Documents. So, that had to be created. Ah, if only that was easy. In older versions of Windows there was a File menu, and you selected New Folder. Vista seems to have made things "easier" by doing away with old-fashioned things like menus, so it took about ten minutes to even create a subdirectory.
Then I needed to save the world file, and again, it couldn't be saved in the usual place - the "worlds" folder under where MUSHclient was installed.
"This is @$#%!&" - I thought to myself. If the developer can't get it to work easily, how can I expect anyone else to?
Obviously, a restructure is needed. Probably this could largely be achieved in the installer, by making it put things in different places.
Perhaps all you power-Vista users can suggest an appropriate setup?
I suspect the installation needs to be broken into two main parts - those that need to be written to (eg. world files, plugin state files), and those that change rarely or never.
So, how about this ...
Things that don't change
These would go into \Program Files\MUSHclient:
- MUSHclient.exe
- lua5.1.dll
- The help file and contents
- The readme.txt file and other stuff that is usually there
The following subdirectories would be created under \Program Files\MUSHclient (as usual):
- lua
- docs
- names
- locale
- fonts
Things that change
The remaining directories would be moved to \Users\<yourname>\Documents\MUSHclient:
- worlds (which includes plugins and plugins\state)
- logs
- scripts
- sounds
Also the directory \Users\<yourname>\Documents\MUSHclient would be made the working directory for the shortcut to MUSHclient. This means that the preferences database, and the toolbar .ini file would go into that directory too (since this is writeable).
Some scripts might not work if they assume the old directory structure, but many directories are available from GetInfo, so if a script uses the appropriate GetInfo item, they should find their directory properly.
eg.
- GetInfo (57) - world files directory
- GetInfo (58) - log files directory
- GetInfo (59) - script files directory
- GetInfo (68) - startup directory
- GetInfo (74) - sound files directory
- GetInfo (82) - preferences database location
Any helpful comments, or suggestions about things I have overlooked? Thanks. |
- Nick Gammon
www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com | top |
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