Hello everyone,

I am mainly trying to contact the dev, asking him to afford us, the players, with a more usable location for savegames.

Usable for what? I am trying to backup and synchronise my savegames in order to be able to
1) not lose progress
2) play the game on different machines without having to start over.

So far, I ran into a very small number of games which didnt permit me to just backup just one folder. As it currently stands in Urtuk, the savegames are tucked in the game/ subfolder, which I cannot simply copy because there is like a 500mb executable in it.

Thus, dear developer, please think about how to facilitate this in future. I would greatly appreciate it.

Love <3

I keep all games in pristine install condition, owned by root to prevent writes into the game directory. For games that insist on writing to the game directory, I use unionfs. You can look at the scripts I use on my misc game support page, or write your own. Once you use unionfs, the writable part of the mount is what you need to back up, and it won't include any installation files.

wow, that looks extremely elaborate, thanks. I guess I will need time before I come to consume this :D

Thanks anyway!

It's not that complicated, it's more that my scripts do a lot more than just that. Just get unionfs-fuse (a FUSE filesystem), and mojunt some random writable directory along with the game directory onto a third directory. Then play within the third directory.

For example, if the game is in "~/GOG Games/Urtuk The Desolation", and you create ~/.urtuk-saves and ~/.urtuk-play, you can mount this with
unionfs -o cow,uid=$(id -u) "$HOME/.urtuk-saves=RW:$HOME/GOG Games/Urtuk The Destroyer/game=RO" ~/.urtuk-play
and then launch urtuk from ~/.urtuk-play.

You could also try soft links, like vv221's ./play.it scripts, or just using lndir yourself. If you have lndir, you can just create a new directory and lndir "<install dir>" . within the new dir. You'll have soft links in addition to your save files, but they are small and easily filtered out (e.g. copy the dir to /tmp first and do "find /tmp/... -type l -exec rm {} \;" before backing it up.

Alright, that sounds quite a bit more approachable, thanks for the explanation.

Actually, unionfs sounds quite interesting even though I'm not 100% solved on its use case as it currently stands. However, it might become interesting in the future - anyway, thanks!

yea, I guess I should have a look at the play.it scripts as well - in a more or less distant future, I want to avoid having games save their progress in their own folder (in case you're familiar with it, I am thinking about moving to GNU guix as soon as I made enough progress on the game packaging front)

have a good one, fellow :)!

Now that Urtuk is out of early access, I plan to add support for it to ./play.it. Such support should include saved games diversion to a dedicated directory, most probably ~/.local/share/games/urtuk.

On the other hand, no promises about when I will be able to actually work on this game. Especially as right now my bank is blocking payments to GOG with no explanation… (probably something along the line of « It’s Eastern Europe, it can’t be legit. »)

So you should understand that as a GOG-flavored « Soon™ » ;)

--- With ./play.it team, we’re always looking for people willing to add support for new packages formats *wink* *wink*
(right now we only support Debian, Arch Linux, Gentoo and their derivatives, and experimental support for Flatpak is waiting for more test reports)

If you’d like to work with us in adding support for GNU guix, please join us on IRC (#play.it on Freenode) or on our dedicated forge.

Thanks for the kind words, I'm looking forward to a play.it script :-)!

As for gnu guix I must kind of discourage you, at least for the moment. Being a noob in programming, I've hit brick walls with it for several times - especially since gnu guix is a different beast than arch or debian. If you are a bit familiar with Nix and how it is different from other operating systems, guix is quite similar to nix.

Nonetheless, I will consider it as soon as I make mentionable progress :)

While I have no experience with either Nix nor GNU Guix yet, I’ve been hunting for information in guix documentation and #guix and #nonguix IRC channels. It seems it will not be an easy task, but still we should be able to support guix wit a bit of work.