Making EVE-Online Portable

[MedicSN6]

I have not tried this yet. But I want to.

 

SOURCE: http://eve.stimpy.org/2009/05/portable-eve-online/

 

I pretty much use my external hard drive for everything these days, and I managed to work out a script that would be able to put Eve on my external without a local install. Of course you probably won?t get much joy if you use a flash based drive, but if you have a decent speed disk drive, this should be possible. I should also note that I don?t use an off the shelf external drive, I have read (although not experienced) that off the shelf external drives will often fail with regular use?

 

Step one in this process was installing Eve locally. I had already installed Eve locally on 3 machines since I move around a lot, so I simply copied the installation from one of those machines onto a directory on my external drive. In this case I am using ?PortableApps? on my drive, using the naming scheme used by http://www.portableapps.com/ only through habit. You can quite easily use a different path if desired. You should change the paths later on to be sure everything works.

 

Step two was getting the settings. This wouldn?t be so much of a problem if the settings were stored on the Eve server, that would make things a lot easier, but instead Eve stores its settings in:

 

C:\Documents and Settings\Local Settings\Application Data\CCP\EVE\

 

There are also capture and chat logs stored in:

 

C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\Eve\

 

Since Eve is looking at those paths to locate your profile settings, its going to continue to save to those paths, even though you are running on an external drive. What you need to do is fool Eve to think that those paths are actually in a different place.

 

The issue that managed to mess me up the most was that within the settings path, a directory is created which is something like ?c_programfiles_eve_tranquility?. Which is great if you?re on a single machine all the time. As you can see the directory name takes some of the path for the installed application, although its not exact since Eve is usually installed in:

 

C:\Program Files\CCP\EVE\

 

The issue with using an external drive is that every time you plug in to another computer, you?re probably going to get a different drive letter. Like I said, its okay for a single machine, but if your external shows as D:\ on your home machine and F:\ on your work machine, then Eve is not going to read the settings. For instance, if your settings directory is called ?d_portableapps_eve_tranquility? and you plug in your external into a machine that assigns the drive letter F:\ to the drive, then Eve will look for ?f_portableapps_eve_tranquility? for settings. Since all your settings are in ?d_portableapps_eve_tranquility?, you are going to get a fresh set of settings and unless you copy everything from one settings directory to another, then you?re screwed.

 

Well the script I?ve worked on also does a rename of the settings directory to reflect the new drive letter. The only issue that I have not addressed with this is that the drive letter comes through as uppercase, and the directory name shows as lower case when created by Eve. Not a big deal since Windows is usually very lax about case sensitivity, but it irked me enough to try and waste an hour fixing. I don?t like complex code, so instead of using a script off the ?net, I decided to pretend its lower case since ?it works?.

 

So without further a-do, here is the script I use to open Eve on a External drive, without any data being saved to the local drive (Note: Not sure if any registry stuff is saved).

 

IMPORTANT: Watch out for word wrapping

 

TIP: If you want to use a different path on your external, replace the ?_portableapps_? section of the settings directory to be ?_yourpath_? or whatever path you have your executable in. I have not tried putting the EVE directory in the root of the external drive. I believe the naming format just takes the lowercase, space stripped name of the first directory that the EVE directory is in.

 

TIP: I place all the settings within the EVE directory (hence %HOME% being set as the current directory and the batch file being placed in the EVE directory). If you want the settings somewhere else, change the ?set home=? line to be the path you want.

 

@echo off

Set home=%CD%

Set char=

if NOT "%1"=="" set char=%1

set home=%home%%char%

mkdir "%home%\Local Settings\Application Data\CCP\EVE"

mkdir "%home%\My Documents"

Set USERPROFILE=%home%

Set HOMEDRIVE=%home:~0,2%

Set HOMEPATH="%home:~2%"

for /f %%i in ('dir /B /W /AD LOCALS~1\APPLIC~1\CCP\EVE\*tranquility') do set var=%%i

IF NOT "LOCALS~1\APPLIC~1\CCP\EVE\%var%" == "LOCALS~1\APPLIC~1\CCP\EVE\%CD:~0,1%_portableapps_eve_tranquility" (

goto movepath

) ELSE (

goto end

)

:movepath

move LOCALS~1\APPLIC~1\CCP\EVE\%var% LOCALS~1\APPLIC~1\CCP\EVE\%CD:~0,1%_portableapps_eve_tranquility

:end

Start "EvE" %CD%\eve.exe /end /lua:off

 

There you have it, feel welcome to comment. This script has been running with no issues for two months now, but I welcome suggestions.