Portable Version?

[meico]

Hey everyone,
I’m not entirely sure if it would work, but I’m thinking about installing the whole game on a USB stick to make it portable.
I remember some other games used to offer special portable versions, which made it really convenient to run them on different setups without having to reinstall or reconfigure everything.

For kids which has to switch between two homes (divorced parents life), it would be super useful to just plug in a USB and keep playing without hassle.
It’d be great for showing cool stuff to friends or just being able to take the game with me without worrying about setups.

[LoveWyrm]

That would be nice, after all, the game already is kind of portable (at least on Linux..I can just delete the entire game directory, unzip/tar a new game version, and it still works).

Just add a settable environmental or launch variable to set the desired data/config directory and the game would be fully portable.

Would have to support relative paths tho, to make USB mountpoints truly flexible, instead of lets say, always expecting it to be something like "/mnt/vintagestick/install/"

but instead "$VS_BASEDIR/../mysaves/"

Which basically would translate to "from the base directory, go up a directory ".." and from there, go to the mysaves directory.

[Brady_The]

On 4/24/2025 at 4:03 AM, meico said:

I’m not entirely sure if it would work, but I’m thinking about installing the whole game on a USB stick to make it portable.

No installation needed! With innoextract you can simply unpack the downloaded .exe installation files, move the result to any folder you like, and even set data and mod directories via shortcut properties. You can find a more in-depth explanation for the latter in this thread.

[Thorfinn]

You can just adapt the instructions on @Streetwind's 

Try it out on a stick, but I suspect you will not be satisfied with performance. An external SSD might be fast enough? Depends on how demanding you are performance-wise..

Another option is to use something like FreeFileSync to quickly transfer the game and data files to and from your stick. Since it updates only those things that changed, that would usually be just your worldmaps, but it would also include any changes you made to config settings, too.

Edited May 1, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Tabbot95]

idk I think there needs to be a better way (to be updated more structurally)