Is It Possible To Make Games PORTABLE?

[DCWalt]

Over the the past little while I've been building a collection of old id games (Doom, Quake etc.). They are totally portable which is super nice. I can mod them all I want and simply drag the single folder anywhere, including to another computer so if I have to reinstall the OS, switch PCs or what ever else I don't have to re-mod everything. I can just copy it over.

 

I would love to add Doom 3, Quake 4 and Wolfenstein 09' to this collection but of course these are newer games and spread themselves all over the computer. is there anything I can do to convert them into a single portable file structure? This would also be incredibly helpful with Skyrim.

 

I get it, it's part of the DRM to make it harder to just copy games but when it comes to these games that can take weeks to mod just right it would be amazing to have them be portable.

 

Any thoughts?

[Radium_Angel]

8 minutes ago, DCWalt said:

Any thoughts?

Anything through Steam is portable. Just copy over the directory to a new install of Steam, and there you go.

[DCWalt]

6 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Anything through Steam is portable. Just copy over the directory to a new install of Steam, and there you go.

I have these games on CD from back in the day. not Steam. And while steam games are sort of portable it's still a giant pain the ass when you have to grab what's in the steam folder PLUS random shit from My Documents and sometimes AppData and then put all of it back. I just want a folder that is the game and can be dragged around.

[DCWalt]

Love Linus and everything but this has to be the most unhelpful tech forum I know of... 

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, DCWalt said:

Love Linus and everything but this has to be the most unhelpful tech forum I know of... 

Very few people here are deeply tech savvy, most of the folks here are simply enthusiasts of computers as they are (modding scene aside)

If you want technical details try ArsTechnica.

 

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

8 hours ago, DCWalt said:

I get it, it's part of the DRM to make it harder to just copy games but when it comes to these games that can take weeks to mod just right it would be amazing to have them be portable.

not that easy, only if want legit copies of the games.

 

there are "mods" to remove DRM but its basically pirating 

but for pirated games, you can move them anywhere you want. usb/ folders 

and just paste back save data to where it belongs.

 

if you already owned the game once , Im not sure if the pirating counts..?

 

[Franck]

It less and less common but some games does required registred library and if you move the location it cannot find the appropriate files anymore.

I can think of some games that require C++ libs install that if you copy the folder to another computer it wont work unless you manually install C++.

But the folder itself can be anywhere. It's just prerequisite that might be install somewhere else on the computer that is not the game folder.

[Paul Rudd]

6 hours ago, DCWalt said:

Love Linus and everything

[Mira Yurizaki]

13 hours ago, DCWalt said:

I have these games on CD from back in the day. not Steam. And while steam games are sort of portable it's still a giant pain the ass when you have to grab what's in the steam folder PLUS random shit from My Documents and sometimes AppData and then put all of it back. I just want a folder that is the game and can be dragged around.

Grabbing stuff from your user folder is going to be a problem regardless, because games are going to be writing to that folder whether you want to or not. If you're lucky, there may be an ini file that has where the game will save its data. But because of the multi-account nature of OS these days, even if you're the only one using it, it's safer for these developers to dump everything to the user folder.

 

You could do some symlink sorcery to make the location the game wants to write to point to a folder where the game is installed, but you're going to have to recreate the link for every OS instance.

[DCWalt]

13 hours ago, Franck said:

It less and less common but some games does required registred library and if you move the location it cannot find the appropriate files anymore.

I can think of some games that require C++ libs install that if you copy the folder to another computer it wont work unless you manually install C++.

But the folder itself can be anywhere. It's just prerequisite that might be install somewhere else on the computer that is not the game folder.

 

10 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Grabbing stuff from your user folder is going to be a problem regardless, because games are going to be writing to that folder whether you want to or not. If you're lucky, there may be an ini file that has where the game will save its data. But because of the multi-account nature of OS these days, even if you're the only one using it, it's safer for these developers to dump everything to the user folder.

 

You could do some symlink sorcery to make the location the game wants to write to point to a folder where the game is installed, but you're going to have to recreate the link for every OS instance.

ok, what about this then. i've never tried to do this so i know nothing about it but what about creating a custom installer that will install the game with the mods. or even just a separate installer that will will install all the mods like a patch or something?

[Mira Yurizaki]

46 minutes ago, DCWalt said:

ok, what about this then. i've never tried to do this so i know nothing about it but what about creating a custom installer that will install the game with the mods. or even just a separate installer that will will install all the mods like a patch or something?

Assuming the mods are drag-and-drop into the game's install folder, you could figure out the file differences between the base game and the game with the mods and package up the differences in a file archive.

[DCWalt]

14 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

yup but Linus isn't my type