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Game executable names to articles


Mars icecream
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There are potential use cases for this information:

  • generic .exe names such as "game.exe" and the Half-Life 2 engine's "HL2.exe" may prevent game-specific tweaking by methods which strictly match by executable (driver control panels, most notably?)
  • screen-capture tools such as RTSS name images in the format <EXE>_<date>.png — here and there I haven't had any other option than reinstalling a game to find my captures

I would add a field to #Other_information

- - -

On a related note, also the folder titles could be added there — some games use abbreviations and Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition directory doesn't even mention its name or series. You could copy the install folder paths directly from the wiki, appending to your game directory path (e.g. C:\Games or C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common).

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Install folder is not particularly useful. If it's a retail or DRM-free game you most likely got a choice of where to install/extract it to, and if it's a digital game there is an easy UI option in that store's client for jumping right to the install folder. The install path also varies greatly between stores.

As for your captures, if you really can't find that you could use Everything (or the Windows search in a pinch) to track down wherever it got saved to.

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I actually think this is a solid idea.  I would take this a step further and use this to point out if the EXE is in a subfolder as well (example: {{P|game}}\Binaries\Danielle\x64\Release\Prey.exe)

Normally I would also say that Installation Folder isn't all that helpful, but there are some edge cases that are... unreasonable.  Most notably, you may have trouble finding Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 in your Steamapps\common folder.  That's because it's called Suzy.  I could see it being standard practice to have an {{ii}} under game data if the folder has a strange name such as this, or note that every game in a collection has its own data stored in a dedicated subfolder.

It would probably be best as a table in #Game_data as @SirYodaJedi suggested, with Mac/Linux file names directly below the Windows EXE.

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  • 4 weeks later...

If this idea is still being considered, I'd also be in favour of adding a table listing the paths of the game's executables relative to the installation folder; I could see it being useful in a couple of scenarios:

  • When the game's executable is buried within subfolders in the installation directory, like "<INSTALL_FOLDER>/Resources/assets/cooked/bin/<game_name>.exe"
  • When a game has separate executables to launch the game with specific configurations or in separate modes like: when a game has "<game_name>_dx.exe" and "<game_name>_vk.exe" to launch it with a DirectX or Vulkan renderer, respectively; or it has a "<game_name>_sp.exe" which is just the single-player mode and "<game_name>_mp.exe"  which is just the multiplayer.
  • And this could be especially useful for Mac and Linux users: unlike Windows, the Unix-like filesystems at the heart of MacOS and Linux don't put any special significance on ".<ext>" file extensions and, as such, executable files have no standard extension like ".exe" and can be named anything on those systems. This is mostly fine on Mac because the executable binary is almost always in "<game_name>.app/Contents/macos/<executable_name>" (but they can be elsewhere and the "Contens/macos" can contain several binaries) but on Linux it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish the executable from just any other file in the install directory.

For these reasons I could such a table being very helpful to the more casual and less technical players. I agree with @Garrett that there isn't much value in listing the installation directory as that can often be chosen/changed freely by the user.

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