Why one should not put plugins in the Program Files section.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Lately there has been a considerable amount of talk about adding plugins to the C:\Program Files section of your computer. Unless you have a specific purpose, this should be avoided.

The game is set up for multiple users on the same machine all using the common Program Files installation files. Any change you make here will be propagated to all users having separate user-ids on the machine.

Now some fixes and adds require editing of some of the .dat files there, and this may or may not work out if you have a multi-user scenario, but for plugins, every user should be able to have an unique set in his/her user-data area.

Perhaps most users have a totally private machine and can do as they please in this area. I am thinking of the family machine or network with a little server where there are several players, each with his own private account. One of the best features of operating systems today is the ability to have more than one user registered on a machine. In this case, be nice and keep your hooks out of Program Files.

In another scenario, how many of us run Sim Mars? You can have the regular game and Sim Mars simply by setting up two user-ids, one for each. Where you want to use different plugin sets, the same trick can be used.

I have done this on both Windows and Linux. I don't positively know whether it works on MAC, but most consumer operating systems seem to do this.

The fly in this ointment is that one user, hopefully the most computer literate of them, has to be designated as the person who maintains the Program Files region. Normally nothing to do, but if you make some of the special additions, be sure all your users understand what you did.

[Jack³ 291]

Some good information. Thanks for clearing this up.