Moving Steamversion of Evochron Mercenary

Ataman · Post by **Ataman** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 5:55 pm

Hi there,

This game recently cought my attention when it got released on Steam. After a few hours of play, I need to say, this is a great game! (And I'm looking forward to play it with friends.)

Now, a technical thing.
As I stated above my game runs on Steam.
My Operating System runs on SSD but Steam is installed on HDD. I would like to speed the game up a little bit by moving it to the SSD. I read the sticky about moving the gamefolder but I'm unsure if it works with the Steam version and don't want to break things up.

Do you have any advice how I could accomplish this mission? What are the trade-offs? I guess it won't autoupdate anymore after moving it...

Greetings and thanks in advance!
Ataman

Post by **Vice** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 5:58 pm

Yes, moving the game would likely result in it not being updated or possibly causing some other problem. One step you can do for now is install the independent build and just run it directly from the desktop icon. Then you can launch/play either version and the Steam version can still update automatically. I'd be interested in learning how the SSD improves performance. It may just help a bit with loading time.

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 6:02 pm

Hi Ataman, welcome to the game and forum...Hope to see you out there some time!...

I have no experience with SSD, since I do not use unsafe practices!....LOL...

:P

Oh, you mean Solid State Drives!, no experience with those either!...

Zaggeh · Post by **Zaggeh** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 6:09 pm

As with all steam games, they must be in your Steam/steamapps/common folder.

The only way to move it is by creating a hardlink. You can find details on Google easy enough, but here's something to get you started:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/a ... 38731.html

You are playing around with your file system structure when doing this, so do so at your own risk.

Fractal · Post by **Fractal** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 8:30 pm

Further to Zaggeh's post, the hardlink created should, under normal usage, be transparent to programs. (unless they are looking for one)

I have performed the procedure, and all steam functions work as normal, including update. If EM uses the standard steam functionality to update, it will be fine. That said, not sure how much of a difference you'll notice during play, but good luck.

Ataman · Post by **Ataman** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:19 pm

Thanks for the instructions Vice!

Installing the independent build (downloaded from your site, hoping it was the right one) worked flawlessly! Profiles are shared with the steam-installation and the loading time decreased from 56 seconds to 22, which is great.

"Shutting down..." only takes a blink of an eye. (Those 3 or 4 seconds were somewhat annoying *g*)
I had some occasional 0.5sec hiccups on the HDD-installation when clicking an item in the trade menu. Those seem to be gone but I have no idea if that actually had something to do with the HDD.

Looks like hardlinks aren't needed for Evochron (expect you really want that steam-autoupdate).

Greetings and fly safe!
Ataman

PS: And thanks for the welcome @ Maarschalk

FarscapeFanBoy · Post by **FarscapeFanBoy** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 6:00 am

Hi everyone. Excited to be here. To answer the OP, I was in the same situation. I now have several hundred gigabytes of games and only want the most demanding ones on my SSD, which is only 60GB (always run your OS on the SSD BTW). In fact, back when I first learned about this I used it to run Shattered Horizon on a ram drive LOL

This is what I did. First download a free piece of software that is amazingly easy to use called "Link Shell Extension". Don't want to break any rules here so not posting the download link unless told it's okay, so just Google it. The author even provides the runtime dlls necessary, though it's likely you already have them on Windows 7.

You make sure steam is not running. Move all game folders you don't want on your SSD to the drive of your choice. (I made a "steam" partition where I created a folder directory matching Steam's, example: J:\\GAMES\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\ ). With Shell Link Extension installed you just right click a game folder, select "pick link source", then go to your default common folder on your SSD and right click an empty space and choose "drop as junction". From then on any updates or changes to the games made by Steam are downloaded to your non SSD drive instead. Nothing could be easier.

Works the same for Origin games, too.

Have fun!

Jaga · Post by **Jaga** » Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:14 pm

Or... you guys could all make your lives easier, and download SteamMover. Essentially does all of this automatically for you.