GameRanger is a free download for Mac and PC that lets you play over 600 games and demos online with friends and opponents worldwide. GameRanger offers features like profiles, friends lists, instant messaging, in-game voice communication, and competitive ladders/rankings/ratings.
Any chance to make a portable version of GameRanger?
Devs?
Thanks
A portable version of GameRanger would suffer the same shortcomings of a portable version of Steam (or any similar service) - only the client would be portable, the games would not be.
This would mean any game run from portable GameRanger would (at best) leave files all over the computers it would run on and (at worst) not run at all.
But Steam is somewhat portable. That giant Steam folder can be freely moved and the whole thing will work alright in other computers.
As for GameRanger, it allows one to select where is the executable of the game, so all you need is the game to be portable as well.
Example of a "portable" game supported by GameRanger: Warcraft 3 (I consider Warcraft 3 a "portable" game because Blizzard removed the drm protections in latest patches and added automatic creation of the relevant registry entries on executable launch).
So, a portable GameRanger would be awesome because it would be one less app to install and configure whenever one formats or buys a new computer.
What you call somewhat portable unfortunately doesn't meet the level required by the PortableApps standard.
99% of those games (whether we are talking about Steam or GameRanger games) will leave registry entries and/or game files and/or game saves behind when you move computers.
If you are lucky you may find someone willing to post a dev test, but I strongly doubt it would ever become official.