Recognizing $XDG_GAMES_DIR

[Robert Qualls]

> It's a bit analogous to windows'  "My Games" / "Saved Games" folder.
> Wine in fact needs it (currently its always using "<My Documents aka
> $HOME>/my games"), though it can do without. Steam is in the same
> situation (Steam on Windows saves to My Games and Steam's online
> service).

I guess fighting what wine has chosen is probably pointless, but I'm
not super crazy about all these directories at the top level of home.
What's worse than "my games" is that some developers just put their
individual folders at the top level, even for wine. For example Mass
Effect 2 just creates ~/Bioware. Naturally, none of these get removed
when the games are uninstalled, so if you want a clean home, you end
up playing musical game save folders to hang on to the saves.

> So there's also the option of defaulting it in
> ~/.local/share/gamesaves or ~/.local/games or something and not have
> it localized by xdg-user-dirs, which is more unixy/linuxy and in which
> case it wouldn't be managed by xdg-user-dirs at all. This comes down
> to "Does game save data need to be user-facing?".

Although something like ~/.local/share/gamesaves is more descriptive,
these directories also have configuration files in them. Some even
seem to have content packs. On the one hand, I don't think the user
needs to "see" game saves, since these take up little space and can be
managed by the games themselves. But the user might want to tinker
with configuration manually, in which case putting that stuff in a
non-obvious place / under a non-obvious name might be bad. I guess I
like ~/.local/share/games because it's consistent. Right now my
~/.local/share is cluttered with native game config folders, so they
could go in there.

Then again, if developers refuse to use anything other than "my
games," putting a "proper" folder somewhere else would just cause more
confusion. And then there's having both a wine and native version
installed simultaneously, overwriting each other's stuff through some
subtle inconsistency...

Robert Qualls.

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 10:44 PM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thoughts on recognizing and managing $XDG_GAMES_DIR, and possibly
> translating it in xdg-user-dirs?
> (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/)
>
> It's a bit analogous to windows'  "My Games" / "Saved Games" folder.
> Wine in fact needs it (currently its always using "<My Documents aka
> $HOME>/my games"), though it can do without. Steam is in the same
> situation (Steam on Windows saves to My Games and Steam's online
> service).
>
> On Windows, the folder contains saves, scores, player data etc for
> specifically games applications.
> This has been on the back of my mind for a little while now. There's
> the obvious answer of using ~/.local/share for game saves (in fact
> thats pretty much what that is for), but there's also obvious
> advantages to having saved games in their own folders.
>
> So there's also the option of defaulting it in
> ~/.local/share/gamesaves or ~/.local/games or something and not have
> it localized by xdg-user-dirs, which is more unixy/linuxy and in which
> case it wouldn't be managed by xdg-user-dirs at all. This comes down
> to "Does game save data need to be user-facing?".
>
> Thoughts?
>
> J. Leclanche
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