Games Files Folder

[bruno2016]

If there a way for the game (eg CMFB, CMRT, CMFI), without reinstalling it, to fetch scenarios, campaigns, saved games etc from a new location, typically from OneDrive in C:\ to D:\ Documents\... ? I realized the game was using the Onedrive game folders (initially located on the C:\ drive and that I later relocated to D:\) instead of using the folders inside the D:\Documents folder. Right now, the scenario, saved games, campaigns etc lists are empty when launching the game.

 

Edited August 14 by bruno2016

[Erwin]

If I understand you, yes, you can always go to your games directory for each game and copy over all scenarios, campaigns, saved games and anything else in there... just like one can copy mods.  I keep backups of all game folders and mod folders on flashdrives and other computers etc

[bruno2016]

The issue is that CM uses the onedrive directory instead of the usual D:\Documents\.... \ Game Files one: When the former is populated the list gets displayed.

To confirm this, I deleted onedrive to see what happens. Then I installed CMFI and it was displaying the games stored in the D:|Documents directory.

Then I reinstalled Onedrive and the list became empty. I copied over the game files folder from D:\ to Onedrive\Documents and now the battles are displayed in CMFI!

This confirms the unexpected behavior.

Note: this happens in my new Win 11 PC. On my previous WIN 10 PC, there was no such issue

[chuckdyke]

2 hours ago, bruno2016 said:

This confirms the unexpected behavior.

Exactly you can select the Drive on which to install the games and hereby avoid the One Drive Directory. It used to annoy me too, because once you save it saves it to One Drive too. 

[BFCElvis]

8 hours ago, bruno2016 said:

The issue is that CM uses the onedrive directory instead of the usual D:\Documents\.... \ Game Files one: When the former is populated the list gets displayed.

To confirm this, I deleted onedrive to see what happens. Then I installed CMFI and it was displaying the games stored in the D:|Documents directory.

Then I reinstalled Onedrive and the list became empty. I copied over the game files folder from D:\ to Onedrive\Documents and now the battles are displayed in CMFI!

This confirms the unexpected behavior.

Note: this happens in my new Win 11 PC. On my previous WIN 10 PC, there was no such issue

CM does not use OneDrive. If that is where the instalaltion is going it is something with the setup of your system, not what the game does by default. But if it works for you...........

 

For whatever it's worth, I HATE OneDrive and it has messed me up a couple of times with things unrelated to CM. It's too intrusive for me.

[Erwin]

Do you want to store you personal intimate, valuable, documents on someone else's computer?   If not, why are you using One Drive or any Cloud storage??

[Vacillator]

2 hours ago, BFCElvis said:

For whatever it's worth, I HATE OneDrive and it has messed me up a couple of times

Me too John, big time.  In my case my new laptop was happily doing normal saves - until I installed Office 365 from one of my employers.  This put OneDrive into action and tried to save everything there (not a good idea when it only had 5GB to save in).  I've fought back against this, but every now and then I notice things are still going there .

While I'm on about it, another consequence of the Office installation was that my (personally owned) laptop now says regularly that 'my organisation requires that I change my password or PIN every x months'. WTF, this is my laptop and my copy of Windows, not my organisation's?  Apart from the cheek of it, I'm curious what might happen when I leave said organisation.

[bruno2016]

21 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

Exactly you can select the Drive on which to install the games and hereby avoid the One Drive Directory. It used to annoy me too, because once you save it saves it to One Drive too. 

I will re- explain the issue: the game is still installed in C:\program files (x86), not onedrive, and the install created the Game files and User Data folders in d;\documents\xxx.

After that, and independently of the install, I activated onedrive. Then CMRT, like all other modules btw (same issue), look for the data in onedrive\documents instead of d:\documents as initially. This was easily confirmed by moving the data out of onedrive and keeping them in d:\documents.

Why all of a sudden CM chooses onedrive to read the data? Is there a way, when installing, to choose the  - data - folder same as you choose the install directory?

[chuckdyke]

9 minutes ago, bruno2016 said:

Why all of a sudden CM chooses onedrive to read the data? Is there a way, when installing, to choose the  - data - folder same as you choose the install directory?

I think it is not CM but Windows. Once you install on C-Drive it will back the game up on One-Drive. The other way out is install on another drive (SSD) for CM Games or any other games you have. Always ask for a 2nd opinion from other members. I got annoyed once my games saves where also on One-Drive. 

Edited August 16 by chuckdyke

[bruno2016]

15 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

I think it is not CM but Windows. Once you install on C-Drive it will back the game up on One-Drive. The other way out is install on another drive (SSD) for CM Games or any other games you have. Always ask for a 2nd opinion from other members. I got annoyed once my games saves where also on One-Drive. 

ATM i have 2 SSDs: one for C : and one for D:. Are u suggesting I install CM in D :? My onedrive is currently in D ; too

Edited August 16 by bruno2016

[chuckdyke]

1 minute ago, bruno2016 said:

Are u suggesting I install CM in D :? My onedrive is currently in D ; too

I suggest ask for advice from somebody else. I am puzzled because One-Drive is in D on your computer. OneDrive is the Cloud and D-Drive on my computer is just for storage. I just copied and pasted this from the Web not my advice but it looks like a solution. 

To stop backing up on OneDrive, you can¹²³⁴:

• Open OneDrive Settings by clicking the OneDrive icon on the taskbar and selecting Help & Settings > Settings.
• In Settings, select Backup > Manage backup.
• To stop backing up a folder, select the toggle for the folder to turn it off. You can choose to keep the files in your OneDrive folder or remove them from your computer's folder.
• Alternatively, you can close OneDrive from the taskbar by selecting Help & Settings > Pause syncing > Quit OneDrive.

[bruno2016]

thanks will check this. This being said it works with CM pointing to onedrive data folders. I will see the cost of reinstalling / impact of deactivating onedrive to benefits of having (hopefully) CM use the D:|Documents directory again

 

[Probus]

Not only does OneDrive backup your files, if you are using 2 computers (eg. laptop and desktop) it can cause CM to hang while it downloads files from the cloud.  Usually this happens when loading CM and when accessing save games. Just figured this out yesterday.

[bruno2016]

10 hours ago, Probus said:

Not only does OneDrive backup your files, if you are using 2 computers (eg. laptop and desktop) it can cause CM to hang while it downloads files from the cloud.  Usually this happens when loading CM and when accessing save games. Just figured this out yesterday.

I think the whole issue comes the "Documents" folder which might confuse CM when installing.  I installed CM after I activated onedrive. I had, beforehand. copied over a backup of the Data folders from my previous WIN 10 computer to the new one into the D:\Documents directory. For some reason, the data in the onedrive CM data directory were initially empty and CM displayed an empty list of battles/campaigns etc. After I manually copied over the data to onedrive from D, CM displayed again everything.

That leads to the question I raised above: why in the first place is CM installing the game data in onedrive instead of D:\Documents as it was always the case before in WIN 10 (except CMBN)?

[dragonwynn]

On 8/16/2024 at 2:43 AM, chuckdyke said:

I think it is not CM but Windows. Once you install on C-Drive it will back the game up on One-Drive. The other way out is install on another drive (SSD) for CM Games or any other games you have. Always ask for a 2nd opinion from other members. I got annoyed once my games saves where also on One-Drive

I agree with this. I have all my CM stuff on a separate external SSD drive. They have worked fine for me.

[OldSarge]

7 hours ago, bruno2016 said:

I think the whole issue comes the "Documents" folder which might confuse CM when installing.  I installed CM after I activated onedrive. I had, beforehand. copied over a backup of the Data folders from my previous WIN 10 computer to the new one into the D:\Documents directory. For some reason, the data in the onedrive CM data directory were initially empty and CM displayed an empty list of battles/campaigns etc. After I manually copied over the data to onedrive from D, CM displayed again everything.

That leads to the question I raised above: why in the first place is CM installing the game data in onedrive instead of D:\Documents as it was always the case before in WIN 10 (except CMBN)?

It sounds like it is time for some screenshots. In Windows 11, M$ has become far more intrusive and annoying, I finally had to turn OneDrive off. Please get a screen grab of your default save locations, mine default to C-Drive(SSD) but I've relocated the actual folders onto D-Drive(HDD), E-Drive(SSD) is reserved for games.

You may find this article helpful for Win11
How to stop OneDrive as the default save location

Edited August 17 by OldSarge
Err. my keyboard hates me

[bruno2016]

On 8/17/2024 at 5:00 PM, OldSarge said:

It sounds like it is time for some screenshots. In Windows 11, M$ has become far more intrusive and annoying, I finally had to turn OneDrive off. Please get a screen grab of your default save locations, mine default to C-Drive(SSD) but I've relocated the actual folders onto D-Drive(HDD), E-Drive(SSD) is reserved for games.

You may find this article helpful for Win11
How to stop OneDrive as the default save location

sure. how did you copy and paste this screenshot here?

Edited August 18 by bruno2016

[OldSarge]

You can either paste it here from the clipboard, or if you've saved it to a file drag it. There is a size limit though, so you may have to shrink the file in a tool like Paint or Paint.net.

Another thought I had was to take a look at where Windows thinks the Documents folder is located. You can find that easily by opening Windows Explorer, on the left panel you should see several icons (i.e. Downloads, Documents, Music, Pictures).

If you right click on the Documents Icon, you see a popup, left click on Properties and you should see a tab labeled location. There should be a textbox with the location where Windows is looking for Documents folder.

This Documents icon should appear above the OneDrive entry.

You may find these helpful
Move Documents Folder to Another Drive in Windows 11 (4 Ways)
Change the location of your OneDrive folder


 

Edited August 19 by OldSarge

[bruno2016]

14 hours ago, OldSarge said:

You can either paste it here from the clipboard, or if you've saved it to a file drag it. There is a size limit though, so you may have to shrink the file in a tool like Paint or Paint.net.

Another thought I had was to take a look at where Windows thinks the Documents folder is located. You can find that easily by opening Windows Explorer, on the left panel you should see several icons (i.e. Downloads, Documents, Music, Pictures).

If you right click on the Documents Icon, you see a popup, left click on Properties and you should see a tab labeled location. There should be a textbox with the location where Windows is looking for Documents folder.

This Documents icon should appear above the OneDrive entry.

You may find these helpful
Move Documents Folder to Another Drive in Windows 11 (4 Ways)
Change the location of your OneDrive folder


 

My onedrive is currently in D:\Documents\Onedrive after I relocated it from C:. Onedrive has a Documents subfolder where it does the sync. the D:\Documents folder is where I originally have my game files (that onedrive put by itself into its own Documents folder). I am trying now, by editing the Location tab, to relocate the onedrive Documents shortcut (which is in grey in File Explorer below) to D:\Documents which is where I want to update all data. But I get an error saying I cant move a child into a parent. invalid path. I checked the forums but could not find any convincing answer.

[OldSarge]

The error message is Windows preventing you from creating an infinite loop of redirects. It sounds like your Documents folder location is pointing to the OneDrive(OD) Documents folder.

Since I no longer have OD on my W11 box, I did a little test on my W10 box, which does have OD. I took a simple folder 'Music' and turned OD Backup on. OD did its thing and backed up the folder and is syncing it. But the problem is that now Windows thinks the path to the Music folder is on OD and not the local drive, that is the Location displayed on the Location tab in properties. Any program accessing music files would be accessing OD. This sounds similar to your problem with the Document folder

I got it to return back to its original location on the local drive by just turning off the setting in OD's backup folders menu. OD complained about it, but it did get everything back to where it was. I did have to re-pin it to Quick Access and OD left a shortcut to the folder's location on OD for each folder.

Which is what @chuckdyke was suggesting earlier.

 

Edited August 21 by OldSarge

[chuckdyke]

I disabled OD just for CM games in settings no problem. 

[bruno2016]

3 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

I disabled OD just for CM games in settings no problem. 

I have by now uninstalled OD but still it wont let me delete the OD directory and the OD\Documents folder which is still sync'ing some of my D:\Documents files (not CM though) like a zombie! But again as before CM displays an empty list of games (as the CM game files are now deleted from OD. Trying to stay calm and find s=a solution to kill this OD once and for all. 

[Probus]

6 hours ago, bruno2016 said:

I have by now uninstalled OD but still it wont let me delete the OD directory and the OD\Documents folder which is still sync'ing some of my D:\Documents files (not CM though) like a zombie! But again as before CM displays an empty list of games (as the CM game files are now deleted from OD. Trying to stay calm and find s=a solution to kill this OD once and for all. 

Careful buddy.  Make sure you do it through Microsoft.  You can really mess things up.

[bruno2016]

36 minutes ago, Probus said:

Careful buddy.  Make sure you do it through Microsoft.  You can really mess things up.

Yes I got help from MS to reinstall OD but keep D:\Documents as my data source. It seems to work. I installed CMFI after this and it displays all the games as expected. But the already installed CMs seem to point to the old OD directory, now deleted. I wish I dont have to reinstall CM to get access to battles and campaigns as it works fine with PBEM and Slitherine.

Edited August 21 by bruno2016