Portable Multiwinia

[allen]

What would be the necessary steps to make Multiwinia portable via flash drive? Want to see if the game will work on the computers at school. I know they are dual-cores with 1gb of ram but I'm pretty sure they only have on-board video. Couldn't hurt to try though.

so I copy/paste my Multiwinia folder onto my USB drive but what about my preferences and the other stuff (authkey file in particular) ? Our computers at school get purged every weekend and not to mention I don't use the same computer everyday, would seem silly to have to change my preferences and put in my key every time I want to play.

I opened up my profile and copied pasted the files and it didn't work. Is there any way to do this? I have Vista so my profile is AppData/Introversion/Multiwinia I believe. Darwinia saved games are in "Saved Games" under my documents but on XP it was different. I forgot the file structure, or I would try to apply that to Multiwinia.

[cde]

OMG. Just no.

1. Making any commercial software portable means finding a way to uncouple the license from the host machine. This is typically a breach of the EULA, and often a route to making an easily distributed pirate version, though I can see the argument that IV's servers would not accept multiple instances of the same auth key.

2. Running unauthorised software on "school" computers, especially anything that has the ability to act as a server, is probably a breach of the terms of use there as well. Dull, but true. If you want it installed, ask an admin - if the answer is no, then don't try to be clever.

3. I was under the impression that people go to school to learn? Or do you have lots of free sessions?

[Pox]

IV let you play the game on as many cmoputers as you want, as long as you only use it on one at a time - so playing it on school machines would be fine as long as it's not actually installed. Running it off a USB key would also mean it won't violate that term of the school policies, though I'm guessing there's also one there for games anyway.

[thePyro_13]

If your school uses windows xp then look up MojoPac. if you install it in mojopac then you should be able to run it off your usb without having to worry about the files in your documents and saved games folder.

[vanarbulax]

3. I was under the impression that people go to school to learn? Or do you have lots of free sessions?

Do you deny that I learn about geology when I play Dwarf Fortress at school? Not that I uh, do that anymore of course.

[allen]

OMG. Just no.

oh hey mother how'd you find me here?

seriously I'm putting this on my USB Drive, not to copy/paste on the computers but to keep it on the USB Drive and leave no trace on whatever computer I'm using. That's what I wanted to know, how to make my settings portable so I won't have to input them in all the time. And I'm not worried about anyone stealing my key or whatever it is you're talking about because again I wanted my key to be stored on my flash drive and preferences.txt. Unless I lost my USB drive then I don't have anything to worry about.

and I do have free time in between some of my classes and I either spend it studying or playing random flash games to pass the time.

I looked at MojoPac and found another similar product and found VMWARE ThinApp but those are too expensive for what I want to do (waste my time in between classes).

[deeCee.]

Too expensive? Just get them for free.

[cde]

playing it on school machines would be fine as long as it's not actually installed

Not necessarily true. Running or installing any unauthorised app is often a breach of regulations. Check with someone, then go along with their reply. The fact that MW includes networking features is a prime candidate for being rejected - either due to perceived network vulnerabilities or just due to non-academic traffic on an academic system.

You can't just assume that the only things that could break rules are things that would require admin rights - locked down networks can be pretty draconian at times.

[Pox]

OK, I should have reread my post, I mentioned that playing games was probably against the rules in itself in the next sentence.

[RabidZombie]

Assuming the game doesn't try to write to anywhere other than it's own directory, this will work. (It reads all the files from it's own directory, so that should be fine).

Investigating.

[Innocent Hawk]

Install Steam on the flash drive directly. Install Multiwinia on that copy of Steam.

Ready to go.

[RabidZombie]

Steam, unfortunately, isn't very portable.

You're suggestion wouldn't work.

[allen]

playing it on school machines would be fine as long as it's not actually installed

Not necessarily true. Running or installing any unauthorised app is often a breach of regulations. Check with someone, then go along with their reply. The fact that MW includes networking features is a prime candidate for being rejected - either due to perceived network vulnerabilities or just due to non-academic traffic on an academic system.

You can't just assume that the only things that could break rules are things that would require admin rights - locked down networks can be pretty draconian at times.

seriously I don't care about the school rules, I've done it before and I can do it again.Hell even professors come up to me and ask what I'm playing . If I can play Defcon on our schools computer I'm sure I can play Multiwinia, so I'm not worried about the network. This post is about the portability of Multiwinia.

[RabidZombie]

Bad news: It seems to be impossible to force the game to save files to it's own directory, rather than the profile directory, without putting in into NT compatibility mode. This, of course, probably creates its own problems, so is less than ideal.

[MrBrown]

It's important for games not to write to the application directory so the game can run fine without administrative rights. I appreciate that Multiwinia does just that as all previous Introversion games wrote all their stuff into the game directory directly. Of course this comes at the price of non-portability unfortunately.