How Do I Alter The NWN Data Folder Location?

Balkoth

I have a C drive which is a solid state and a much larger D drive for storage. Since loading documents quickly is not exactly critical, the My Documents folder is on my D drive. And because I want NWN to run quickly (especially for toolset work) I have it installed on my C drive.

...except Beamdog is apparently moving the player data to the My Documents folder (amusingly enough, I didn't even realize this until after I put mods/music/haks/etc in the Beamdog Library directory). And I cannot seem to find an option to adjust where the player data should be.

Any help?

Gorgon

From the Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition (v74).txt

Launching executables with the command-line option -userDirectory alternative_directory will use alternative_directory instead of the one specified.

E.g., "C:\path\to\nwmain.exe" -userDirectory "C:\path\to\user files"

Change the "Target:" line in your shortcuts like that, and you should get the results you want.

Balkoth

With some effort I finally got it working -- it wouldn't accept an existing directory of information, it HAD to be a brand new folder and then I had to manually copy stuff over. Thanks.

Thorsson

A bit late now, but I had the same issue with NWN2. I solved it through using Windows 10 to play around with what folders were included in (My) Documents. Mine is now on my desktop for easy access and includes all my "game documents".

Balkoth

Ran into another problem -- it wouldn't accept my multiplayer key as valid. To fix this, I launched the game from within the Beamdog client and that then ignored the directory (since the command line argument is in the shortcut), so all of my saves and modules weren't there (it made a new directory). I got around this by then copy/pasting the CD key from the newly created directory (in the wrong place) to the alternative directory, which works in the end...but this means I can never launch the game from the client, which is unfortunate.

Gorgon

That's what I get for quoting instructions I don't actually use myself.

You might also run into issues when updating the game, without the user folder in its standard location, but I don't think updates make changes to user files. Only the install files. I guess you'll find out with the next update, heh.

If you know how to use symlinks or junctions in Windows, you can link the user folder at the original location from wherever you want, but many Windows users don't know how to do that (Google has plenty of info on it).

If you want to use the Beamdog client to launch the game, there is another option that should work, which is changing the directory aliases in the nwn.ini that point to directories inside the main user one. There is more info about that here: Hak/module/tlk/etc file locations

Thorsson

I've had no problem with my customised (My) Documents Folder (Windows 10). I do think it has to be the Documents folder though, not just any random folder.

Balkoth

Thorsson said:

I've had no problem with my customised (My) Documents Folder (Windows 10). I do think it has to be the Documents folder though, not just any random folder.

And the Documents folder ISN'T on the solid state drive, which is the problem. I already moved "My Documents" to my D drive which is fine for most things, but I'd like all of my NWN stuff on the SSD.

Gorgon said:

You might also run into issues when updating the game, without the user folder in its standard location, but I don't think updates make changes to user files. Only the install files. I guess you'll find out with the next update, heh.

I'll find out indeed. Like I said, I originally didn't even know there was a user folder and thus put all the stuff in the Beamdog folder (which worked...but would be deleted next update).

Gorgon said:

If you know how to use symlinks or junctions in Windows, you can link the user folder at the original location from wherever you want, but many Windows users don't know how to do that (Google has plenty of info on it).

Presumably that still leads from the C drive over to the D drive and then back to the C drive which is something I'd like to avoid.

Gorgon said:

If you want to use the Beamdog client to launch the game, there is another option that should work, which is changing the directory aliases in the nwn.ini that point to directories inside the main user one. There is more info about that here: Hak/module/tlk/etc file locations

Ironically I have the opposite problem of that fellow -- he wants stuff OFF the SSD because of the size...I have a big enough SSD and WANT it on the SSD for the speed.

Thorsson

Balkoth said:

And the Documents folder ISN'T on the solid state drive, which is the problem. I already moved "My Documents" to my D drive which is fine for most things, but I'd like all of my NWN stuff on the SSD.

Yes, and what I'm saying is that it should be on the SSD BUT you don't have to keep all your documents in it. And that you can create that situation by changing which Folder is seen as the Document folder by Windows.

Balkoth

Thorsson said:

Yes, and what I'm saying is that it should be on the SSD BUT you don't have to keep all your documents in it. And that you can create that situation by changing which Folder is seen as the Document folder by Windows.

Is there any reason besides NWN EE that my Documents folder should be on my SSD? You seem to be saying moving the Documents folder to the D drive was a bad thing?

Thorsson

Balkoth said:

Is there any reason besides NWN EE that my Documents folder should be on my SSD? You seem to be saying moving the Documents folder to the D drive was a bad thing?

The Documents folder is where saves, overrides, haks and other player specific stuff goes. I figured it's best if that stuff loads as quickly as possible. The same seems to apply to other games that use the documents folder.

voidofopinion

Thorsson said:

Balkoth said:

Is there any reason besides NWN EE that my Documents folder should be on my SSD? You seem to be saying moving the Documents folder to the D drive was a bad thing?

The Documents folder is where saves, overrides, haks and other player specific stuff goes. I figured it's best if that stuff loads as quickly as possible. The same seems to apply to other games that use the documents folder.

In theory that makes sense.

In practice that's not actually how it works.

Data read speed is bottlenecked by the game engine and not so much the hardware.

Large transfer of data is sped up significantly by SSD but average read speed are quite low once a game is up and running.

Overwatch has a peek read speed of 20MB/s and an average of 1MB/s.

The Sims 4 peeks at 4MB/s read and <1MB/s average.

This is well within the average read/write speed of old 7200RPM mechanical hard drive.

I don't know about NWN:EE but I highly doubt you are getting any demonstrable effect by having your save data for most games on an SSD vs a mechanical drive.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIXSSOzyLbs

While the video focuses on 3,500 MB/s drives vs 540 MB/s the principle is the same as is the amount of data the game is using while in motion.

It's like putting a 2 month old baby in a king size bed. No matter how much they flop around they will never take advantage of all the room you have given them.

Storage technology is advancing faster than video games ability to utilize that blisteringly fast speed. Heck, most games are designed and optimized to run on a consoles 5200 rpm hard drive.

Take into account NWN is attached to a 15 year old frame and you begin to see why it does not seem to benefit from an SSD as much as say... Battlefield 1 or Fallout 4.

That's not to say that current and next generation SSD's are not absolutely game changing. They are. But it really doesn't matter if you can load data at 3,938 MB/s if the game can only read 5MB/s.

Thorsson

Oh well, I noticed an improvement on PWs, but there could be other reasons for that. I don't test every time I make a change and note down the details!

voidofopinion

Thorsson said:

Oh well, I noticed an improvement on PWs, but there could be other reasons for that. I don't test every time I make a change and note down the details!

It could well be a contributing factor.

But the answer to "Should this data be on an SSD" is a bizarrely complex equation. It certainly isn't going to hurt but there are some major bottlenecks when it comes to SSD's and gaming that don't really get talked about.

I would be very interested in seeing peek/avg read rate of one of the bigger servers!

Clisair

Gorgon said:

From the Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition (v74).txt

Launching executables with the command-line option -userDirectory alternative_directory will use alternative_directory instead of the one specified.

E.g., "C:\path\to\nwmain.exe" -userDirectory "C:\path\to\user files"

Change the "Target:" line in your shortcuts like that, and you should get the results you want.

It would be better if we could set this in the INI, especially for those of us that have several NWN setups. I myself have 4 different, actually 6 different folders with NWN setup. 3 are for PW setups that I have, 1 with 1.71 community, one for gog NWN and one that is unaltered for the Platinum disks.

Sherincall

Clisair said:

It would be better if we could set this in the INI, especially for those of us that have several NWN setups. I myself have 4 different, actually 6 different folders with NWN setup. 3 are for PW setups that I have, 1 with 1.71 community, one for gog NWN and one that is unaltered for the Platinum disks.

But, how would you know where to look for the .ini? It's in your user directory. You can use the ini to set the aliases for all the subfolders, but the -userDirectory flag basically tells the game where to find the .ini.

Clisair

This one use of the command line should definitely be the very first thing in the docs for the game because everyone is going to be looking at how to set this up.