Batch file for Skyrim convenience?

[Mikeyman64]

Hello all, long time no-post, I know. My brother-in-law bought me a SuperJoy III the other day, so I might be on here for some making-of action. But that will be later, when school isn't.

Anyway, I was one of the (sadly) few folks to pick up Skyrim on the, much better platform , PC. I don't know the number exactly, but at the GS I was at the line for Xbox-to-PC/PS3 (yes, PC and PS3 merged forces to form one, slightly larger entity) seemed to be about 9 to 1. Anyway, that's not what I'm here to discuss.

What I am here to talk about is a convenient way to manage, or rather, sync game saves for Skyrim. Steam decided not to sync them with Steam Cloud, and understandably, because most of the player-created saves are 5MB+, and that would be nuts on their servers. However, I have seen many cases pop up on the interwebz of people wanting an easy way to sync saves to different computers (my case being desktop in room with laptop hooked up to HDTV... also in room... don't judge me!). Dropbox seems to be the first idea people come up with, but since nobody can find a way to change the default save location for Skyrim, that solution proves fruitless.

The idea I came up with involves a bit more knowledge of making batch files than I currently poses (I know what they teach you for A+... which is next to nothing).

If there was a way you could tell a batch file to move the latest created save file from the default Skyrim folder to your dropbox upon the closing of TESV.exe, that would solve every multi-PC Skyrim player's problems and there would be much rejoycing.

I'm going to ask my grandpa sometime this week if he has any ideas. He was one of those computer guys back in the days when DOS was literally as good as it gets and he coded with it a ton. It's a long shot, but we'll see.

-MM64

[lifeisbetterwithketchup]

Code: Select all

@ECHO off
COPY "C:\path\to\dropbox\folder" "C:\path\to\skyrim\save"
"C:\path\to\skyrim\main\exe"
COPY "C:\path\to\skyrim\save" "C:\path\to\dropbox\folder"
@ECHO on

This ought to work for you. Only problem would be that things get screwy if one computer tries to run it while the other is still running it. There are checks one could implement that would prevent bad things from happening in this situation, but I kept this one simple. I wrote a batch script for syncing Adobe Premiere and After Effects project files across computers using Dropbox doing pretty much exactly the same thing as this (plus some running backups and timestamped files), but including checks so two iterations of it are not being used at once.

[Mikeyman64]

Okay, so from the simple little batch file seen above, and some information I got elsewhere along with a bit of tinkering, I think I have the solution.

First off, I made a "Skyrim Saves" folder in my dropbox folder to make things nice and organized. The game save and TESV.exe paths are default.

Code: Select all

@ECHO off
xcopy "C:\Path\to\Dropbox\Skyrim Saves\" "C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\" /d /s /r /y
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\TESV.exe"
xcopy "C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\" "C:\Path\to\Dropbox\Skyrim Saves\" /d /s /r /y
@ECHO on

You might need to change the code a little bit for each computer you use, depending on where you have your directories.

I then stuck the .BAT file in my Skyrim directory and made a nifty shortcut on my desktop with the path:

Code: Select all

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\SKYRIMSAVES.BAT"

This will launch the batch file first, which will copy all new saves from your dropbox to your local saves folder, then launch the game and after exiting the game will copy all new saves from your local save folder back to your dropbox folder, effectively syncing your Skyrim saves.

-MM64

[blortski]

Even sexier is to change the Dropbox folder location to the Saves location, and change the name of the Dropbox folder to "Saves" (see http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=9665" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;).

Then your files sync every time you save, not just when you leave the game!

[spartan2600]

I registered just to post this. All of this stuff is way overcomplicated, with .bat files and the like- you could easily accidentally overwrite your Skyrim saves with an empty dropbox folder. Go here for easy directions and safer methods;

http://lifehacker.com/5154698/sync-file ... box-folder" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;