Saved Games Folder (Vista)

mr.sly · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:08

[mini-rant] One of the major reasons I hated Windows XP when it was first released, is that a lot of developers decided to start creating their own folders in My Documents, to store saved games. With no option to move the saves to a different location.

Now one of the major reasons I was looking forward to Windows Vista was the 'Saved Games' folder. One easy place to find and store my saved games, and easy to backup if I wanted to format or move the files to a different computer.

But still one year after launch I can only think of Command and Conquer 3 that uses the folder. Even the killer game for Vista, Crysis fails to use the folder.

Can you think of any other games that use it? And do you think this should be a requirement to get a 'Games for Windows' title?

Dano · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:10

Yes it ought to be, I uttterly despise the fact that My Documents gets littered with all sorts of junk with no sort of consistancy.

Squark · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:12

Dano said:
Yes it ought to be, I uttterly despise the fact that My Documents gets littered with all sorts of junk with no sort of consistancy.

Agreed.
Why cant they use the services provided rather than my docs?

Darkwave · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:17

I agree.

RobH · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:23

I agree, all new PC games should use this folder. Microsoft could have implemented a %SAVEDATA% global much like how many apps use the %APPDATA% global to dump their data, this way we could actually choose where the data goes (this might be how it is done in Vista, I'm not sure).

leaskovski · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:24

Because we programmers are lazy foe's

HangTime · 4 Feb 2008 at 22:24

Tell me about it, I've recent got STALKER and then put Vista x64 on, where are the savegames... hmmmm...

C:\Users\Public\Documents\stalker-shoc

Wow, how logical. Most of it seems to end up in that C:\Users\<me>\AppData\Roaming\ place which would be kinda OK if eveything went there, but no, you get other stuff scattered around.

One of the biggest devolutions in gaming over the past 10 years has IMO been the move to storing setting and files in the registry/external folders, whereas in the good old days if you installed a game you knew EVERYTHING would be in that directory, even the settings going in .ini files, with savegames in a subdir. It makes it an absolute PITA especially following a windows reinstall, only to find you have to re-install and re-patch the game due to missing regkeys or somesuch.