Hello All,
I am building a Retro Gaming PC running Lutris and Steam on Ubuntu 20.04. I am looking for a way to share my game collection (mostly GOG.com and old DOS games) between me and my kids on the same machine.
I’d like it to work like any other Linux application: I install it system-wide, amd each user opens it inside his user and all changes made (i.e.: game progress, settings…) are saved for each user specifically.
Thanks!
Well, you could start by placing all game installations in a central location, making yourself the owner, and assigning a new group to it of which you all are members. And of course assigning the same permissions for this group.
That should solve the access part.
As for sharing saved data, that depends on services like steam or gog. If all users use the same account for those services then it shouldn’t matter much?
Hi,
Sorry, just saw your replay. What you’ve suggested is a great idea, thanks!
I want to allow each (linux) user to start with a blank (unused) game progress, so each user continues from where he left off, without overwriting what another user did before him with the same game.
Is that viable with the solution you’ve suggested?
Thank you, again
I can only do the theory here. A lot is dependent on how for instance GOG saves user data locally. And how cloud data is handled.
I believe GOG is more open than Steam. Steam does have a feature called family sharing but it has some limitations:
https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing
Game cloud data is part of the account where the game is played under. So all situations I see described on this thread assume a shared account for GOG:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/family_sharing
But GOG is DRM free so games can be played offline. Keep that in mind when buying games. I expect you will have more options with GOG then with Steam in this matter.
On with the technical aspect. And disregarding the cloud part. And forgetting about Steam as its not DRM free.
I have Blade Runner installed. This one runs in ScummVM ( https://www.scummvm.org ). The save data is in this location:
<install-directory>/game/data/saves/
Another one is Final DOOM. A dosbox game. The windows version running through wine. Here all save data, cloud or local, is saved in this location:
<install-directory>/cloud-saves/
When running through GOG Galaxy these locations are most likely synchronized to the cloud. I run my games locally from Lutris.
So what I would to is create a clean install, zip it, and put this in a central location. You can create a bash script to extract it to a location in the users’ home directory. If you configure Lutris to look for GOG games in the users’ game directory then it should see them.
That’s the closest you can get without violating any rules.