My first thought for why things fails is the the Environment.SpecialFolder don’t map, and thus I found this page talking about it
So I ran the code on my Windows XP box and got:
Desktop C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Desktop
Programs C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Start Menu\\Programs
Personal C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\My Documents
Personal C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\My Documents
Favorites C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Favorites
Startup C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Startup
Recent C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Recent
SendTo C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\SendTo
StartMenu C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Start Menu
MyMusic C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\My Documents\\My Music
DesktopDirectory C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Desktop
MyComputer
Templates C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Templates
ApplicationData C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Application Data
LocalApplicationData C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Local Settings\\Application Data
InternetCache C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Local Settings\\Temporary Internet Files
Cookies C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Cookies
History C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\Local Settings\\History
CommonApplicationData C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data
System C:\\WINDOWS\\system32
ProgramFiles C:\\Program Files
MyPictures C:\\Documents and Settings\\spilgrim\\My Documents\\My Pictures
CommonProgramFiles C:\\Program Files\\Common Files
and on my MacBook I get
Desktop /Users/parents/Desktop
Programs
Personal /Users/parents
Favorites
Startup
Recent
SendTo
StartMenu
MyMusic /Users/parents/Music
DesktopDirectory /Users/parents/Desktop
MyComputer
Templates
ApplicationData /Users/parents/.config
LocalApplicationData /Users/parents/.local/share
InternetCache
Cookies
History
CommonApplicationData /usr/share
System
ProgramFiles
MyPictures /Users/parents/Pictures
CommonProgramFiles
One question raised on that page is why are there two Personal values, and it’s because MyDocuments is the second Enumeration, but .ToString() only names the first in order of an enum set.
So the mystery deepens as I’m using Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal, and therefore it should work, but it seems to be failing to create the data directory, time to explore more…
After some a bit more playing around I found the file “SAVE/player.cha” in my Mac folder structure, and realised I was doing string concatenation with DOS slashes, etc. hard coded all over the place, so I refactored the code, and now it saves/loads files fine.
I then created a Mac .app bundle, so you can now just download form Google Code the Mac OS X version of the game, un-tar/gzip it, and as long as you have Mono installed, tada, instant game action. Albeit slow…
Only problem to solve is that the save files are case sensitive, in how they are searched and managed, and I’ve not got a standard schema in place. I may have to build some wrapper code to manage this, so odd DOS/Windows casing works fine on Mac/Linux systems.
Also I’ll have to make a Linux tar ball for those Linux/Mono people to test play with.