preferred game folder on windows 11

[geoff]

Seeing the recent posts on windows 11 reminded me that I hadn't re-installed WinSPMBT after moving to win 11 a couple of weeks ago.

everything went fine until the 17.5 a mini patch, which said it couldn't find the files to update. (So I re-read the post and saw I should have extracted it to the main game folder.:o duh)

My question is that the main game folder for me now is the one that the CD (version 1.0 something) defaulted to - C:\Program Files\Shrapnel Games\The Camo Workshop\WinSPMBT. I noticed that the more recent upgrades (eg 16 and 17, maybe 10 ) wanted to default to C:\Shrapnel Games\The Camo Workshop\WinSPMBT.

Is there a preferred folder for installation?

[Mobhack]

Yes, the path we nowadays tell people to use in the game guide and lots of posts on these forums, and which has been the case since windows vista which introduced the personal user folder feature whereby it tries to "manage" files the end user has installed under the /program files hierarchy.

The cure for this is to move the installation outside of \program files for older (mainly MS-DOS originating games as ours is) and so windows will not get confused and try to put updates etc into the users personal folders where the game does not expect them to reside Rather than into the one folder under which it was installed, as programs were before Microsoft introduced the Unix-like structure in Vista, and conveniently forgot to include the use-case for all the software written before Vesta existed. Pure Microsoft arrogance, as usual!:doh:.

So:

C:\Shrapnel Games\The Camo Workshop\WinSPWW2

(or SPMBT, as appropriate)

It is noted in the game installation section of the manual, in a whacking great big yellow info box, which should be hard to miss...

However - anyone with an older CD-ROM or downloaded installer will have the old path physically "baked into" the distribution media and so will need to manually remove the "\program files" part of the path in the installer when it shows the suggested path to use.

N.B. the same goes for many older software packages, not just ours. I got an aged DOS PASCAL compiler to work again by installing to outside of program files once.