Can I tell you an operating systems joke? Of course I can.
- MacOS says, “We’re going to help you,” and mostly succeeds.
- Windows says, “We’re going to help you,” and mostly gets in your way.
- Linux says, “We trust you know what you’re doing. Here’s your rope. Have fun!”
Executive Summary: This is rather long, but I went with the suggestion of @Pstemarie as it ended up being the simplest.
Read on if the paint has finally dried and you’ve not yet found anything else to do.
I tried the solutions offered by both @Pstemarie and @Daz and they worked for me, but with caveats that are both unexpected (by me) behavior from Windows AND NWN EE having something to say about the name of the folder it’s willing to use for your local data.
What I did initially to move just EE’s Neverwinter folder from C:…\Documents (SSD) was to drag it to the D: drive (HDD) create a shortcut there and drop that shortcut back into the c:…\Documents directory. No joy.
The instructions from @Pstemarie indicated that I had to move the Documents folder from it’s Properties context menu, tab Location. No problem.
When I tried the same thing with a Neverwinter folder created by EE, it does not have a Location tab on it’s Properties panel.
I did not try to determine if that was a Windows feature or something EE configured.
I also tried the instructions from @Daz and discovered that EE was pretty “controlling” about what folder name it would accept in the -userdirectory parameter, variously modifying it or just replacing it with a “Neverwinter” folder. There may be a pattern to this, but I didn’t find it.
Further, I’m using GOG Galaxy, not the Steam client. (GOG gives you a copy of Diamond if you get EE from them.) The shortcut set up as proposed by @Daz worked as expected except for the folder naming stuff.
To do the same thing in GOG Galaxy:
- Go into the installed games page of the Galaxy client (this assumes you have already used Galaxy to install the game itself where you want it. No problem there.)
- Click the control panel (slider controls icon) to the right of the “Play Button”
- Go to Manage Installation > Configure…
- Click the Features tab
- Scroll down to the bottom, click “Add another executable / argument” or Duplicate a working one
- Edit executable and parameters to taste, click the radio button to make that the default executable and click OK.
So with all these interactions between OS, application and installer/launcher, I’m going with the simple solution proposed by @Pstemarie Except, of course, wouldn’t it be nice if the executables & base files were on the SSD for performance and…
Hmm. Maybe I should play the game for a bit before I forget why I went through all this in the first place.
Thanks to all for the assist!
Dustin