@DATABASE GRAC V2 TUTORIAL
@$VER 1.0 (31/4/97) © 1997 Andy Gibson
@node main "SAVE PATH BUTTON"

      This  button  allows  you  to  set the Save Path for all your saved
      games.

      ie.  During  playing  a  game created by you....the user selects to
      Load/Save  a game and your SAVE PATH was SAVE_DISK:, the user would
      then be prompted to insert the disk named SAVE_DISK into any drive.

      He/She could then save/load their game positions from there ;^)

      It's as simple as that.

      You can make this any path you like. But please do tell the user of
      your  game that he/she will need a blank disk named (your save path
      - in this example it would be SAVE_DISK)

      Let's  say  you have created a game which is ready for distribution
      and is on 4 disks called:

      GAME1
      GAME2
      GAME3
      GAME4

      And you have set the save path to SAVE_DISK: then you would have to
      tell  the  user(s)  of  your game that they would need a blank disk
      called SAVE_DISK to allow the loading and saving of games.

      Why  not  just  set  the  path  to one of the actual game disks (eg
      GAME1....GAME4) ?

      A few of reasons:

      1) It's not a good idea to do this because if the user was saving a
         game and removed the disk while the file was being written to it
         chances  are  that  the  disk  would  become trashed (Read/Write
         Errors).  This  would  mean  their  disk  would  be unusable and
         therefore  they  would  not be able to play the game unless they
         had a backup of the disk (which you could do I suppose :)

      2) Your  game  disks might  be full of data and therefore the saved
         game  files  might  not  be able to fit onto the disk. You won't
         know  how much space will be on your game disk(s) until you have
         your game ready for distribution anyway.

      3) If  you ever want to send  updates of the game out to peeps, the
         new  disk might have new data on it (new rooms/characters/sounds
         etc)  and  therefore  the  user  would not be able to save games
         anymore :(

      4) By  letting  the  user save games to a blank  disk is better all
         round  anyway.  They will have more than enough room on the disk
         to  hold  all  saved game positions and when they have completed
         the  game,  they can just wipe the disk and use it for something
         else ;-)

      There are loads more reasons that I would personally use a separate
      disk  for  these  purposes for, but it's up to you. If you want the
      user  to  be  able  to  save  to the game disk, then do just that -
      you're the boss and it is YOUR game in the end.


@endnode