[STRONG SUGGESTION] Support for more relative directories (AppData, User Docs)

[subspark]

Okay, it seems AGS is limited to writing files to a user's Save Games directory.
While this is fabtastic for save game files, we have resource data that we want to seperate and hide from user save data.

I would certainly appreciate support for some of the common shell directories other game engines are using.
For example: http://savelocations.wikia.com/wiki/Shell_Folders#Personal

Basically put, we don't want our users tangling up our game data with their save data and making use of these stock standard shell paths makes sense to those of us who are wrting custom resource files.

Cheers,
Sparky.

[Pumaman]

I suppose it would be possible to add this, but is there really any harm in writing any additional files to the save games folder?

[monkey0506]

For this suggestion, if it is to be implemented, I'd just like to voice my opinion that I think an $APPDATA$ tag could be appropriate but must correspond to a writable directory in Windows XP, Vista, and 7. I believe the "Application Data" folder in Vista is also protected but there's another similarly named folder that is writable (or some such). It's important (for obvious reasons) that this must be a writable folder.

For non-Windows OSes this would have to expand differently. I don't know enough about either OS's data structure to know if a comparable folder would exist, but if not then I would say just using the $SAVEGAMEDIR$ would be an acceptable compromise for now, until someone comes up with something better at least.

[subspark]

I suppose it would be possible to add this, but is there really any harm in writing any additional files to the save games folder?

Well for one, our game has many chapters, and save files would be shared and distributed on the net. Being able to write to a directory that most users wont touch not only saves us from a huge list of support emails but also allows us to manage the data the way other proffesional game engines do.

Again, this feature really is particuarily important to us.

Cheers,
Sparky.