TL;DR: Please (find a way to) place game save files into a conventional directory like Documents\My Games\Stonehearth.
I noticed that the save-games are saved to the installation directory of Stonehearth. This is slightly problematic, as program installation folders are not supposed to get included in backups, and deinstallation should ideally be as easy as deleting the directory.
On Windows, apparently the de-facto standard for save-games is using the user’s MyDocuments directory, putting savegames into MyDocuments\My Games\NameOfTheGame\ or a subdirectory thereof. Or at least, this is the only directory on my system containing data from dozens of games. The name My Games is (thankfully) locale-agnostic, i.e. the English name is used on my German system. I can’t comment on Linux, should this be relevant.
Word of warning: Windows 7 and later allows relocating the documents-folder, and the naming convention depends on the version of Windows. Hence sadly this idea is probably harder to implement than it sounds at first. There is no environment variable pointing to the directory.
Another de-facto standard, albeit a bad one, is using %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA%. While these are slightly better than the game directory, backups are a mess (requiring extensive exclude-rules for cache files etc).
TL;DR: Nope. Please, no. For the love of Celestia, no.
Long answer: I would like to see this as an option but NOT as a mandatory change.
While placing any saves in MyDocs folder is convenient for backups, it is a Windows-only solution, while SH will eventually be (I hope) multiplatform. Personally, I somewhat hate the MyDocs “conventional” place as it breaks the older “agreement” of “One program, one folder”. Currently many programs (and games) use Program Files, AppData AND MyDocs, making manual deleting a pain in the… butt.
Ideally, give us an option to manually choose save dir location. I guess this way everyone will be happy.
I am with @MelOzone here. Furthermore, on systems with a dedicated drive for the OS (which don’t have to be that large then), all the saved data from games can quickly plug up that drive. I hate gemes doing this
@BarbeQ Windows actually has explicit support for changing the location of MyDocuments (as opposed to AppData, where it is theoretically possible, but quite likely to break OS upgrades). Right-click “documents” and select “properties” (or whatever it is named in English).
Still, putting user-files into the game-directory has caused me to lose save-games before. Also, with many games putting their save-games into Documents, we already have to deal with that anyway. I’d rather have all save-games in one location, and “Documents\My Games” is as close as it gets.
@MelOzone Regarding multi-platform: Every platform has its own conventions for file locations, and none of them favor the installation-directory. As I said, the idea is a lot more complex to implement, than it sounds… (Unless the engine used by StoneHearth has builtin support for it.)
I know about this option. But the Documents folder is also the place where I store other stuff… like my documents
My gaming pc volumes are basically structured by usage: so, one for Steam and for General Games, one for Media, one for “Stuff” and one for the OS. And I want my games (including all the stuff that belongs to them, say save games, mods, etc) in one of theses volumes. Heck, some games even store their mods into the Documents folder nowadays. Thanks to these shenanigans, my Documents folder is several GB large. But I can see where you are coming from.
I just noticed that the save-games are pretty big (~50MB), but can be easily compressed (~9MB as zip-file with winrar at “fastest” compression setting, ~8MB at “best” (slowest)). Probably an issue to be considered when implementing save-games either as user documents or if implementing Steam cloud support (I have 768kbit/s upload speed only).
