This is a folder showing my games installed via proton. There has to be a better naming convention than this, surely? Why did Valve make it a random string of numbers instead of something like taking the game/application title with a number on the end like “NameOfGame_01”? If a folder is already detected with the same name when installing something then it can just be “NameOfGame_02”
I understand the reason for having a unique named folder to avoid any conflicts but damn, random numbered folders makes it so much harder to find the install paths for non steam games. Valves method seems simple but annoying for the end user IMO.
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random numbered folders makes it so much harder
They are not randomly numbered.
Naming things is hard, and text on computers is fraught with peril. Numbers are safe.
What if you have a game named
Русская локализация? Would that help you? Or\orCOM1, would that even work on Windows (nope)? Or two games namedFarming Simulator? How do you disambiguate?The number is the store ID, which is not unique to Proton and has been used by Steam forever.
While I get what you’re saying,
steamapps/commonalready has a similar directory structure (a folder for each game) with names likeRobocop Rogue City,Red Dead Redemption 2andProton BattlEye Runtimeso it seems like they probably already have unique names.That’s a good explanation. Makes me feel a lot less upset that they did this now.
If I knew where to make suggestions for Steam, I’d request a by-name directory containing the canonical name (as it appears on the Steam Interface) as a symlink.
e.g.
compatdata/by-name/Starfield -> compatdata/1716740Hell, I’m wondering if I can write a script to generate it. I need to figure out how to resolve id->name but after that it should be easy.
You could go through
protontricks -lor through the appmanifest files in$library/steamapps; you can get all configured libraries from~/.steam/root/steamapps/libraryfolders.vdf.
Dude, just use portproton
IDs like this always work. They’re universal, and any other property of a game can change and the directory remains the same.
The answer is simple, names can change, internal identifiers not so much
https://github.com/Jannomag/shortix
Here’s a utility that will translate them from Steam AppID(they aren’t random, except maybe non-Steam games) to their name and setup links you can use to navigate them.
Hope this helps!
Somebody already gave you the why, but for finding these folders, protontricks can work great. Open protontricks after having installed and opened the game, click on the default prefix, then browse folder (or something like that) I use it all the time to save me time. You could also put a description on the folder to identify it in future.