[Fury]

One of our beta testers brought up an interesting issue. Since TBP is a total conversion, seperate from any other FS2 installation. Its a problem that TBP stores its settings to same registry entries as other FS2 installations.

So practically we'd need a way to seperate TBP settings from FS2 and possibly other total conversion & mod settings. However, we'd prefer to retain system registry approach. I vaguely remember RandomTiger considering an .ini file approach, but I have no idea whether it is supported in the current launcher.

[Inquisitor]

It is not, to my knowledge.

[karajorma]

I'm not quite sure I follow Mr. Fury. What registry settings would you have for TBP that would be different from FS2?

[Fury]

Preferrably all of them.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Volition\Freespace2] is used by all FS2 installations, including total conversions and mods. This won't be a problem to mods since they rely on FS2 and use -mod flag, but for total conversions it would be better to have their own registry entries.

For example:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Volition\Freespace2\TBP]

(Strangely it gets cut from middle of TBP...)

I am sure many would like to have seperate commandline options to both and at very least, -mod flag which is stored to registy will give trouble. In other words, TBP as well as other total conversions are supposed to be independent.

[Fury]

No comments?

[taylor]

One way to do it is with a special binary just for TBP.  Certainly a route that I don't want to recommend but the choices are limited.  It could possibly be done with a cmdline option, if I remember the startup order correctly.   As long as no registry acces is made until after the cmdline parsing then you should be ok.  You could have EternalOne make a test build with the change for TBP testing.  If the -tbp (for instance) option is used then you could tack TBP\ on the end of the registry string.

[Inquisitor]

Yeah, if you really need that, you need a seperate binary. I would much prefer ini files over registry, sicne we DO want to maintain multi platform support, but as with all things, need someone with time and inclination.

Also, since this is for a mod, I would like it to end up in the TBP wishlist like we discussed at the meeting

[taylor]

Originally posted by Inquisitor
Yeah, if you really need that, you need a seperate binary. I would much prefer ini files over registry, sicne we DO want to maintain multi platform support, but as with all things, need someone with time and inclination.

I did mention that in the previous post but removed it before submitting since I know this has been brought up before but couldn't remember the official position.  I did look at the Linux code for the ini file and with only a couple of minor changes it should work on Windows too.  It currently uses CFILE to read and write so the ini file would be specific to a mod directory if -mod is used.  I actually doubt it would take me more than an hour to get working and tested.  The hardest part would be modifying the Launcher to work with this.

@Mr. Fury: Do bring this up as a mod wishlist thing and I'll do something about it if there aren't strong objections from others.  If there are further questions for me then I'll answer them there.

[Fury]

It will be in the wishlist which I will post on sunday.
In the end, it doesn't actually matter if its an ini or registry as long as it works.

[Inquisitor]

I did mention that in the previous post but removed it before submitting since I know this has been brought up before but couldn't remember the official position.

All part of the service

The registry is a bad place to store stuff like that unless you are Windows only. My opinion is that nothing core to running the game should be in the registry. It's great for stuff like uninstall paths, etc. I think everything else should be platform independent. Less code to maintain.

That, and TBP could just create their own INI without re-writing the registry checking stuff I like the -mod path bit.