System/User Config File Support

[doggan]

I'm thinking to add support for a system config file + overridable user config file, that would be used to store basic engine settings.

• resources/settings-default.ini is required, and would store all the default engine settings. This is managed in the repository and should not be edited by the user.
• resources/settings-user.ini is an optional file. If it exists, any specified keys would overwrite whatever is specified in the default file.
  • Ideally, the user settings file should be stored in the correct platform-specific user directory. This could be done in a future task, along with creating a file system interface for easily managing root/user/etc directories. For now, I think it would be fine to keep it in the resources folder.
• For starters, I'd like to expose resolution settings (width, height, depth) which are currently hardcoded in the sdlbackend source. This would also serve as a test case.
  • As a next step, it might be nice to manage diabdat.mpq/diablo.exe paths from the settings file as well. This would prevent us from having to copy the files the same directory. Also, it allows us to experiment easier with swapping out different mpq/exe versions by just changing the paths.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

[wheybags]

I think you've got the right idea here. However, I think it pulls in some related issues - having freeablo read anything from the current directory was only ever intended to be a temporary measure, so faio needs to be updated to read from (~/.config/freeablo, or %APPDATA%\freeablo). This folder should contain a freeablo.ini file with game settings, and the resources folder. The game could also check for a freeablo.ini at /etc/freeablo.ini, and Program Files/freeablo/freeablo.ini, and if it exists, load that first, then overwrite it's settings with those from the local one.

When we get around to writing a game launcher, it should include a generator for the config file, that would copy in diabdat.mpq and diablo.exe as required, and set the paths in the config.

[doggan]

How would you like to proceed? I could get the settings files working (as I described above) from the current directory for the first step. Then as a future issue we could update the FAIO interface to handle reading/writing to the correct user directories, and move the settings files at that time. The FAIO interface changes would be a much bigger task, which is why I thought it would be good to split the work up.

[wheybags]

Sound cool, yeah

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 3:49 PM, shyam notifications@github.com wrote:

How would you like to proceed? I could get the settings files working (as I described above) from the current directory for the first step. Then as a future issue we could update the FAIO interface to handle reading/writing to the correct user directories, and move the settings files at that time. The FAIO interface changes would be a much bigger task, which is why I thought it would be good to split the work up.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/wheybags/freeablo/issues/80#issuecomment-42312064 .