This post is way to technical, not quite fit for player consumption. It is however fit for developer consumption, and I am publish this in the hopes that someone with a Windows scripting background runs with it. If you do not have a scripting background, your eyes are liable to glaze over.
Once upon a very very long time ago, on a computer before the ones we are using now; when we wanted to run multiple concurrent eve clients, we made junctions of our Eve folders. Each time we wanted to change a pilot, we had to enter a user name and password.
Once upon a time, but more recently than that, when we wanted to run multiple concurrent clients we called the Eve exe once per concurrent client. Each time we wanted to change a pilot, we still had to enter the username and password.
Today, here and now, when you want to change pilots inside an account, we have this 'wonderful' Eve launcher that allows us to remember our accounts user name and password and access the Eve store, but ... you must re-enter the username/password when you want to change pilots between accounts.
I find this frustrating; especially when resetting my PI. Planetary Interaction is limited by the number of planets you have. More alts with PI means more planets. But using alts means more logging in.
My old method of resetting PI is :
- Log onto every account, selecting the pilot that has been offline the longest.
- Do PI. At any time there is a break move onto the next account's pilot; Especially during the warp from POCO back to POS
- When finished with a pilot log onto the next longest offline pilot on that account.
- Whine about having to re-enter username/password when swapping accounts. Sometimes get up and for some cheese.
When you do this on ... too many accounts it becomes tiresome. There are some PI pilots I know with
way more accounts than I run. The same issues may apply for heavy research, manufacturing and market accounts.
An Eve folder contains the following files and folders
- A launcher folder
- Other folders include bin, bulkdata, lib, res and script
- A whole series of files, including
- *.stuff files, containing textures, sounds and other in game resources
- *.patch files, apparently can be deleted once applied
- *.exe files, being the actual executables
- *.ini files, containing various some configuration information
- cacert.pem and ca-bundle.crt which I believe to do with encryption
- debug.log, obvious file is obvious
- code.ccp, manifest.dat, __access_check__; file names are indicative, but *shrug*
So I googled; and found lots of entries from before the 'new' launcher.
I tried to copy the launcher folder itself and running the launcher.exe that is in it; no luck, it would not start a new launcher window.
What roughly worked was copying the entire eve folder. This allowed me to have 2 Eve launchers concurrently, but copying 18GB of data takes a long time as well as a fair amount of disk space. It also means that your system can't cache the same files; meaning lower overall system performance. I wanted better.
What I am now using.
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4 Launcher windows all open at the same time.
Apart from cropping and obscuring the account name, these accounts are all active at the same time. |
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Each additional Eve instance takes 174MB
Again, cropping and obscuring personal information. |
I have a script 'makeclone.sh' that takes an Eve folder, and replicates it
- Copying the launcher folder as is, where is; This obviously is copying stuff not needed (including old log and browser cache files), but is quick and small enough
- For all other folders, junctions into the replicated folder back to the originals in the primary Eve folder. These must be junctions, symbolic links did not work.
- All files are hard linked into the replicated folder back to the original files in the primary Eve folder
All of this takes about 15 seconds per replicated folder, at 1% of a full Eve installation. This could be made smaller by working out what is needed out of the Eve installation; I suspect that a launcher/cache folder structure without files would save space, but so far have not been bothered adding that complexity to my script. It also is very flexible in coping with future CCP changes.
- Update the 'master' normally with the launcher.
- re-run the script to blow away the existing replicated folders, and make new versions of them.
On my version of windows, the personal settings are in %localappdata%\CCP\EVE, with a new fresh set of files for every replicated folder. I am contemplating changing my script to copy my primary installation's settings over to the replicated folders, but have not yet decided. I like the idea of updating my overview once, and then automatically cloning it, but have not gotten that far yet.
My command prompt environment and scripting language, is a bash shell from cygwin (
https://www.cygwin.com/ ). The script itself is available as a
pastebin or
google drive document.
As always, too many words, not enough pretty pictures. I also suspect that for the majority of readers, this takes the prize for 'Driest Foo post ever'. On top of that, I have based my scripts on my skillset; which is a Unix/Linux based scripting language in a Windows environment; so it is not yet even useful to the majority of you, at least not yet. It is also likely useless for Mac users.
What I do know is that there are others with more Windows based scripting knowledge than I have, that could easily translate this into a Dos batch file, or failing that a Powershell script, so it is available to the wider Eve community.
Assuming you have actually read this far, if you have something like this script that anyone can use, either based on this work or independently created, please leave a comment. Similarly, if you are lacking in scripting skills and want something like this without the cygwin dependancy, also leave a comment.
