Slitherine

Morning all,

Apologies if this appears to be a dumb question. Have never purchased a digital download before.
How many times can the game be installed?
Can the game run off a USB stick (memory stick)?

Regards
8furball

Welcome.
The game can be installed as many times you want. However you can not run Panzer Corps in two machines at the same time.
As for the USB stick question, I suppose you're asking if it's a portable version. I'm afraid not, Panzer Corps runs only from the Hardisk.
Maybe you want to take a look at the Common Questions sticky thread: viewtopic.php?t=27283

Feel free to ask for anything. Folk here are friendly and helpful.

Perhaps the answer can be expanded a little bit...:

No, it's not portable in the sense you can just plug in a stick and run an EXE.

But I don't see why you can't install the game on a drive that just so happens to be a memory stick. (You can't then remove the stick and play the game on another computer unless you install it there too, as per above).

Or am I wrong?

Molve wrote:Perhaps the answer can be expanded a little bit...:

No, it's not portable in the sense you can just plug in a stick and run an EXE.

But I don't see why you can't install the game on a drive that just so happens to be a memory stick. (You can't then remove the stick and play the game on another computer unless you install it there too, as per above).

Or am I wrong?

The game can probably be installed in a USB stick. To be more precise, a part of the game only.
There's still "Documents\My Games\Panzer Corps" in the Hardisk. Besides don't forget that Windows registry.
So the game can probably (never tried, but don't see why not) started from a stick, but will still needs the hardisk and Windows registry.
So it's not like the portable applications that can run from the stick without needing the hardrive and avoiding creating permanent keys in the registry.

Thanks.

Guessing here, but the OP's concern seems to be more along the lines of just what does a digital download mean vs the techicalities of a portable drive.

Basially when you downoad the installer , as long as you keep that safe ( ie backup on a burned cd or a portable drive, you could techincally install as many times as you need. Not 100% sure but I believe Matrix and Slitheirnes policy is you can install your game onto 2 PC's ie a home PC and say a laptop. You could not , of course play MP between those two computers though

Actually, even not being an expert on this matter, I believe it wouldn't be very hard to make it portable.
Of course, that's pure speculation on my side.

We havent tried it here and woudln't recommend installing to a portable drive like a USB stick but if you did it would only work on the PC you ran the installer on, no matter which PC you plugged it in to. You need to install on any PC that you want to be able to play on. Installers configure your machine as well as dropping in the files and without the configuration it wont run.

I guess in theory you could move the My Documents portion of the data to the USB stick as well.
Then create a registry file that will input all the relevant directories (ie. make them point to the USB stick) to the registry of the computer it's run on.

Fimconte wrote:I guess in theory you could move the My Documents portion of the data to the USB stick as well.

That probably could be the hardest. I believe it's hardcoded. I've found no registry keys to control where you can save the game. Also no ini files. So the game will always save in My Documents.

VPaulus wrote:

Fimconte wrote:I guess in theory you could move the My Documents portion of the data to the USB stick as well.

That probably could be the hardest. I believe it's hardcoded. I've found no registry keys to control where you can save the game. Also no ini files. So the game will always save in My Documents.

If the game is adhering to the Windows standards it is using a environment variable(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_variable for details) to determinate the correct path where to save the data. You could change that to point it to your USB stick. The problem is tho it will be changed for every single application which is not what you normally would do. The solution could be a batch file used to start the PanzerCorpse executable that first stores the old environment variable , then sets it to somewhere on the USB stick and starts the game. After quiting the game it restores it to the old value. Still you would need administrator rights to be able to do it and all applications run at same time as PanzerCorpse would be affected by the change as well so you probably would not want to use any other application at the same time.

That would be just a workaround. Not a perfect solution, IMO.
It's a pity that this isn't set by a ini file or something of a sort.

When you are dealing with updaters etc, you need some static point to keep install folders, etc. Using the registry (for example) makes this a lot simpler for us. It's just not worth adding additional installer complexity to allow what would be a tiny minority of users to run the game portably, as much as we would like to.

Cheers

Pip

That makes sense, pip.
But the issue here is related where the game save are localized, the custom scenarios... nothing related with the installation of the game.
I too agree that this is not even an issue, and personally it isn't important. Although, I always like to have every file related with the game, installed in only one main folder with several subfolders.
But it's like you said, I too think, that only a minority would be interested in a portable version.

VPaulus wrote:That would be just a workaround. Not a perfect solution, IMO.
It's a pity that this isn't set by a ini file or something of a sort.

Of course it would be only a workaround and a quite messy one on top of it. I think i made it clear in my post but it could be a solution for someone who really needs a portable version for whatever reasons. On the other hand when you need portable version you probably won't have admin rights on the targeted system which makes it fail anyway. The fun of modern computing.

VPaulus wrote:Although, I always like to have every file related with the game, installed in only one main folder with several subfolders.

This causes problems on multi user systems tho. The game ends usually installed in a directory where a normal user do not have right permissions and the saves need to go somewhere where an average user without admin rights can write. Even if you work with admin rights, which one should not for security reasons, the mutli user problem still persists as the save files from different users may get mixed and overwrite each other.

Tarrak wrote:On the other hand when you need portable version you probably won't have admin rights on the targeted system which makes it fail anyway.

Exactly.

Tarrak wrote:This causes problems on multi user systems tho. The game ends usually installed in a directory where a normal user do not have right permissions and the saves need to go somewhere where an average user without admin rights can write. Even if you work with admin rights, which one should not for security reasons, the mutli user problem still persists as the save files from different users may get mixed and overwrite each other.

Indeed. I just said it in a personally basis. I don't have any other users using any of my games. But that's a fair point.