OS X - Installing for multiple users?

Macintosh support forum for Eschalon: Book I
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mikepwagner
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OS X - Installing for multiple users?

Post by mikepwagner »

I downloaded the demo, and played it, and really liked the game. My daughter (who has another account on the same machine) also wanted to play it. I had installed the game in the "Applications" folder on my hard drive - but it wouldn't let her play. It appeared that the permissions were set incorrectly. I set those so that "Everyone" could read/right, but it still denied her permission.

I have administrative privileges, and she doesn't, if that makes a difference.

I tried installing the game in Users/Shared, but still couldn't get around the permissions problem.

Right now, both of us have a copy of the demo installed in the "Applications" directory in our home directory. That apparently is the only way that we can both play the game.

Does the game install itself the same way, or is this an issue only for the demo?

Mike
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Post by Randomizer »

Since it comes as a dmg you should be able to install multiple copies even though this will use up more hard disk space.

Edit - The problem might be that the installed game creates only one folder with saved games in My Documents. When another player uses the application it tries to access the saved game files in the first area where games were played.
chortick
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Re: OS X - Installing for multiple users?

Post by chortick »

I am having this same problem, with some complications:

- I installed the software as myself (admin)
- I tried running the software as my son (managed acct): will not start
- I checked all permissions, it should work at the O/S level
- I found a folder in my Documents that contains saved games and a config file
- I copied that to my son's Documents, and gave him permissions, still wouldn't run
- Logged in as my son, installed the software, it runs but won't accept my license key
- Logged in as me, it won't run
- Logged in as me, installed, now it won't accept the license key

I would welcome any advice here. I want the software to work for both accounts.

<I have edited out my comments about DRM, in respect of the response below>
Last edited by chortick on November 28th, 2008, 4:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BasiliskWrangler
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Re: OS X - Installing for multiple users?

Post by BasiliskWrangler »

chortick wrote:Some observations. DRM is stupid. I paid you, and now I am wasting my time trying to get this to work, because of your defective licensing system. I don't want to hear your justification of it, I (your customer) am telling you that it's annoying. If you employ a marketing professional, please forward this to them.
We don't use DRM, so you must have bought this from one of our distributors. Forward your invoice to us (email address on our website) and I'll help you out.
See my ramblings and keep up with the latest news on Twitter & Facebook.
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Getharn
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Re: OS X - Installing for multiple users?

Post by Getharn »

Multi-user systems seems to cause a lot of problems for reasons which confuse me slightly, but that's coming from the background of developing under Linux where you're basically forced to accept that the user's home directory is the only place on the disk you have any permissions to write. I would have thought that the situation was similar under OS X, but apparently it's a little more permissive - certainly on my OS X system I don't seem to need any root passwords to write to the apps folder (which I don't really agree with, but I guess I can see where they're coming from).

Personally I'd like a read-only system partition, and a per-user overlay mounted via unionfs, but that's probably why freaky people like me don't design Linux distros.

If I can meekly offer a suggestion, BW, maybe it's worth finding whichever OS-specific functions you need to grab a user-specific home directory and hiding them behind an OS-independent abstraction - then you can use that directory for all data, and regard everywhere else as read-only. Of course, users will need to copy save games to share them, but that doesn't seem unreasonable.

This might well be the way it already works, and I appreciate that this is just one of the myriad pitalls of writing cross-platform code (even in supposedly platform-agnostic languages). Still, the multi-user one seems (naively) to be a relatively easy one to address, and well worth it for the potential hassles on non-Windows systems.

As a friendly aside to Chortick, it's worth trying to be a bit good-natured with your posts, and avoid rants and fulminations. Remember that there are fans on this forum who might well be able to help you out with some problems, but may well choose not to if you're not polite. Problems are frustrating, but keeping your frustrations to yourself is probably the quickest way to get a helpful response. Just in case it wasn't absolutely clear, by the way, I'm just a fan myself - I make absolutely no pretense at all of representing the opinions of Basilisk Games in things like this, just a bit of friendly advice.

In any case, I hope you manage to sort your problem out.
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