Installing OpenIV on a drive other than C:\
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Hey, so I just spent two hours figuring this out and I figured I'd post the solution here to potentially help some other rando in the future.
When installing OpenIV, it forcibly installs to the {User}\appdata\local folder. I have limited space on my C:\ drive, and wanted to instead install it on my mass storage drive. The solution ended up being a hard link (aka a junction). Basically, it links two folders on two different logical drives together, so software "see" it as the same location. There are ways to do this via command prompt, but I'm lazy and instead downloaded Link Shell Extention (found here: https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html). It adds the ability to make hard links, among other things, to the windows context menu.
Steps to create a hard link with Link Shell Extention:
- Go to the location you want to install the OpenIV software
- Create a new folder and name it "New Technology Studio" without the quotes
- Right click the folder, and click "Pick Link Source"
- Navigate to your {User}\appdata\local folder
- Right click in empty space to bring up the context menu
- Hover over the "Drop As...>" option, and choose "Junction" from the submenu
This will create the hard link, and you are good to install OpenIV as normal
I'm not sure if ScriptHookV or RAGEPlugginHook have similar requirements for installation, but if so this should work for them as well.
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@Furry-Garbage I'm sorry but I had to laugh when you said move ScriptHookV, it is under 1.4MB and doesn't need to be installed on the C drive. Real killers are the dlcpacks and they can be moved outside of the root folder, regardless of the physical drive or partition you installed the game on.
https://forums.gta5-mods.com/topic/35856/relocating-dlcpacks-multiple-mod-installations
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@JohnFromGWN I have a 100GB partition acting as my C:\ drive, I don't have extra space on there for non-essential software. Not to mention, for QoL reasons the Appdata folder is a really terrible place to put your base install. It's a hidden folder for one, so someone with little to no knowledge of computers is going to have a hard time finding it. Two, it's write protected by default, which means you need to set the *.exe to run as admin on program start if there are going to be any writes to disk from the software. It leads to more potential headaches than problems it solves imo.
As for what I said about ScriptHookV and RAGEPluggingHook, it was that I didn't know what the installation requirements were. I hadn't installed them yet. Having said that, I'm glad to hear ScriptHookV didn't fall victim to lazy coding in the same way as OpenIV. And make no mistake, an unchangeable install folder is lazy coding.
Edit: Having installed both softwares now, they both go into the game's install directory. What I said stands, if for some reason you need to install anything to a different folder, hard linking will fix the problem.
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@Furry-Garbage We're in full agreement. My comment was really about SHV given you had mentioned the limited HDD space. I don't like the fact that OpenIV doesn't give you the option to select the path, and I hate applications that decide to install in Appdata rather than Program Files where they should be by default, in other words unless you select the path.
Also, Open IV hides itself as New Technology Studio?
But they're not the only offenders, check your 3 appdata folders and look at all the crap installed by microsoft and company. So much for being a user folder. I guess that's why they hide it by default.
Again, if you're preoccupied by disk space on your OS partition, check out my post on moving dlcpacks. I haven't looked but it's likely we can move other files as well. I have most of my steam apps, including GTA5, installed on another physical drive. I try to keep only the essentials on my OS drive, much easier to image/backup this way and don't want it to fill up.