Advance warning: this will only make sense to you if you've been following QuakeOne.com
OK, so it looks like I got a little too ambitious and underestimated the extent of the negative reaction my original post and plans revealed elsewhere would get. I had also somewhat underestimated the extent to which people would read the wrong/bad thing into it, and cling on to that impression in the face of all explanation to the contrary. The only reasonable criticism was from a security/trusted app perspective, but that is the one that I'm going to take seriously.
I do want to set the record straight however and say that a full HD scan was never the default behaviour. If you go back to my original post on this topic you'll see that has been the position from the outset. Unfortunately things developed the way they did, and even more unfortunately I got annoyed and posted a rant here, which I have now removed. No need to make a public trainwreck of things.
All that aside, the security/trusted app perspective (something along the lines of "I would be very suspicious of an application that does a scan of my HD if I hadn't asked it to") is a perfectly reasonably and rational one, and it does apply even to the reality of a full HD scan as a last resort. As a consequence I'm going to disable the code for steps 2 (check of well known folders) and 3 (full HD scan) in release builds, so that the version you get won't do this. I'm leaving it in debug builds as it's still useful to me for development and debugging.
It seems a pity to see something that was originally designed with the intention of being helpful to the user going slightly down the plughole, but even the best of intentions don't always work out; road to hell and all that.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
W_LoadWadFile: couldn't load gfx.wad (slight return)
Posted by
mhquake
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1:16 AM
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5 comments:
Thats too bad, I thought it a good idea.
I was glad to see a dev putting in the effort
Just checked the forum of which you speak, gotta say, I would have liked to see what you had to say beforehand.ba
Although I will never need the feature, for I KNOW WHERE MY QUAKE FOLDER IS, i still think it was a good idea..
How about a compromise along the lines of..
1) look in current folder
2) look in obvious places
3) pop up a dialog, giving the user the choice to brows to his quake-folder manually, let DirectQ do a HDD scan, or quit.
This way, the expert user who accidentally unzipped his archive into the wrong folder (or forgot to use the -basedir commandline option) can browse to the correct folder without getting suspicious, and the totally clueless user can just hit the "scan HDD" button and be done with it.. (the clueless type will probably not be suspicious anyways).
The overly paranoid user can just hit the panic button and quit ;)
Gah, it's not like you drunkingly called an ex-girlfriend at 3 in the morning. We're all quakers, 'tis good, 'tis all good!
I say that, as I read the post (i.e., blogs such as this are why we have RSS feeds!), and I see no harm in it all. Post more, it's good stuff, as always. If you're not getting paid for it and doing it for the love of it anyhow, who cares!
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