Warsow
Description: Warsow is a free standalone first person shooter game for Windows and Linux. It is based on the Qfusion 3D engine (a modification of the Quake 2 GPL engine), and aimed on the competitive scene, or the e-sports community.
Category: Games
Link: http://www.warsow.net/
License: GPL
Size: The downloaded ZIP file is 181MB
Portability: The game is quite portable as it is, although the included portable executable seems out of date. But using the correct command line it seems to run quite well. I tried it with a generic launcher I created for personal use but it seems if it gets an official PA launcher it's ready for prime time shooting
warsow_x86.exe +set fs_usehomedir 0 +set fs_basepath App/warsow
(I still need to check what usehomedir does exactly, but I guess means all files will be downloaded in the apps folder.)
Personal Notes: Compared to many other free shooters Warsow features excellent stylish graphics and has some neat game play tweaks. There is always servers to play on and there are different game modes (Capture the flag, deathmatch, team deathmatch....)
I don't think I want to maintain a portable version at this time, but I think its very well worth a look and making it portable might be a breeze.
PS. I'm not sure if there's already an up-to-date portable version with installer, launcher and splash screen around, but this game is definitely worth an official PAF.EXE release.
For now I'm using my universal launcher (configured through an ini file) to play it from my USB but I think this one deserves a place on PortableApps. I hope you'll agree!
on my PDrive, it is already portable, just need to be "pafed"...
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
If you're religious about having the config file inside the Data/Settings folder I might add copy the config file to appdir and on exit move it back. (Although that means 5MB overhead for the NSIS and extra write/read for the flash disk (which as we all know has a limited amount of read/write actions.
If usehomedir is 1 the downloaded levels (as well as the config file) are put inside applicationdata\warsow\basewsw folder so having it set at 0 is correct. I however cannot find out how to set a custom folder. Moving downloaded content to the Portable Apps Data folder I think should be avoided. First it wears the drive, second the files can be big and third, there's really no real need to back up downloaded levels, and having to run the launcher in the background... And last and not least copying downloaded levels would increase the opening and closing of the app beyond what's usefull.
I might add the copying of the config file, but I'm a bit worried about all that writing to flash due to wear of the drive.
About making a portable version, I don't have the space to host that big files. Maybe I can work around it by just posting the launcher. But my launcher is completely different than the one used by Portable Apps so this might never be allowed to become official.