New release of Eternity Engine

Graf Zahl said:

Anyway, I am having no such problems when using Explorer to unpack a Zip file on Windows 7. What do I have to do to get it?

Hmmm, maybe it is just a Vista thing, XP also works fine for me.

At least two people have reported this issue, so I believe it is real. One person said they needed to change something in the control panel to allow EXEs to be unpacked from zips.

If Microsoft have fixed this (or made a sane default) then I would be happy to make unpack-and-run packages again, though I've got the installer stuff working and that has its benefits too -- e.g. adding an entry into the start menu.

There is a solution for this in Eternity anyway. If you have /base in a non-writable area, you need to configure /user to be somewhere writable. No amount of API calls will give you permission to write to C:\Program Files - in order to do that you have to have administrative privileges, and Eternity is not about to try to run as admin.

Instead you go to the Windows environment settings and set ETERNITYUSER to point to <AppDataDir>\Eternity\user and move the contents there (where <AppDataDir> is the literal path, ie., C:\Users\Foobar\AppData\Local or C:\Users\Foobar\AppData\Roaming ).

Eternity does not have an installer for Windows, so it doesn't do this automatically. The reason is that 90% of our users have indicated that they want to place Eternity wherever THEY want it, and not use an installer.

In my experience it's best to keep games and source port stuff in your user directory, where everything is unconditionally writable.

Also, andrewj, all Microsoft did was move to the same model employed by all the *nix, BSD, and other POSIX operating systems. Installed programs don't go in a writable directory there either, except to root. It's a security thing and, working in the IT industry, I can tell you it was sorely needed. The price came in the form of some backward compatibility with applications that did things that were already disrecommended - you were NEVER supposed to write to Program Files in the first place. Nobody listened.

AlexMax said:

Does Ladna have plans to work on ClientServer anytime soon, or is that project on hold?

Yes and no.

I have much the same problem SoM does; I work, school & tutor during the year and I work & school during the summers. Beyond that, I'm usually drinking and cleaning shit up. If I do get spare time, the last thing I want to do is merge 5000 changes and debug all day.

I've been plodding through an experimental keybindings/interface branch. If/when I get that merged into trunk (pending lots of testing & discussion) then C/S is on deck.

Quasar said:

Eternity does not have an installer for Windows, so it doesn't do this automatically. The reason is that 90% of our users have indicated that they want to place Eternity wherever THEY want it, and not use an installer.

Unfortunately, I bet a lot of them want to put it in Program Files anyway, because it's a program, right? So many "compatibility" issues with Vista/7 were really just due to this mindset, which is why you still find guides telling you to runs games as admin when you really just need to install/extract them somewhere else.

At the very least, VirtualStore solves this problem for most users without them even realizing it. It's only when config files or whatever need manual updating that it becomes a problem (and even then, there's a nice button to go right to the virtual folder in the menu bar, so it's as user friendly as it could possibly be).

Also seconding what Graf said about Windows' zip extraction. Never had a problem with it skipping executables. I see no reason not to use it - it's faster than doing the same thing with 7zip for standard zip files.