PROTIP: For people with the steam version that frequently are going in the A2 dir

If you edit Arma stuff a lot, such as addons and the like, you may find it irritating that steam does not allow you to choose where to install Arma2. So you've probably made a shortcut to the buried folder by now. I just found a nicer way to revert to how I had it in Arma1 and OFP.

In vista and windows 7 you can now make directory symlinks. These are not shortcuts, but real filesystem symlinks.

Back in the day, my OFP was in d:\OperationFlashpoint

Arma1 was in D:\Arma

Now Arma2 steam edition is in D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2, this will not do!

So I ran the command from a cmd prompt:

mklink /d d:\ArmA2 "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2"
symbolic link created for d:\ArmA2 <<===>> D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2

This makes a fake Arma2 'folder' on my D drive that isn't really there, but no app can tell the difference. When I go into it, it is exactly the same as going into "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2". The filesystem translates it. If you've used a *nix, you are probably familiar with this.

You can read about the command here http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-symlinks-in-windows-vista/

There is also a freeware GUI app if you don't want to use the command line. http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm

Here's what mine looked like after I had already made the link:

I don't know if you can do it on Windows XP. You may be able to make a junction point instead. But if you have Vista/7, a directory hard link is best.

If you are annoyed with the placement of the 'user profiles' in Arma/Arma2, you can always specify them on the command line. See here. http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/-profiles

BIG RED LETTERS

These tweaks can be dangerous if you don't understand how they work. Don't accidentally delete your arma folder! If you want to delete the link, delete the 'fake' folder.

That's pretty cool! Just a thought though... If I had like 12 GB RAM, I could make a 10 GB RAM disk, put all of ArmA 2 on it, make one of them fake links and say goodbye to loading times?

Good tip. In Windows 7 I ended up making a folder with shortcuts to the various folders I needed, then adding that folder to my taskbar and changing them to Icons only.

Got one button for my missions folder, one for my RPT folder, one for my main Arma 2 install and one for my Arma 2 dedicated server install.

You can read more about it here and there is also a tool making this somewhat easier:

Virtual_folders_and_files

That's pretty cool! Just a thought though... If I had like 12 GB RAM, I could make a 10 GB RAM disk, put all of ArmA 2 on it, make one of them fake links and say goodbye to loading times?

YES, kinda! :)

But you would have to recopy it every time you rebooted unless the ramdisk software does that for you. If you used a fake link, it would still load from the original location though!

Did you know you can move some of the games stock addons from the addons folder to another drive too?

You don't even need to have a junction for that, you can just do -mod=d:\otherarmaaddons where d is your other drive that arma isn't installed on. I tried it with a fast USB stick but it didn't work as well as I'd have liked. I dont think it could make enough concurrent reads and it would make the game crash. But on a hard drive it should work, or a real ram disk.

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Good tip. In Windows 7 I ended up making a folder with shortcuts to the various folders I needed, then adding that folder to my taskbar and changing them to Icons only.

Got one button for my missions folder, one for my RPT folder, one for my main Arma 2 install and one for my Arma 2 dedicated server install.

Yes for the longest time I was using the 'Libraries' which is useful for collecting folders together like that. But it does get a little confusing when there are 2 MPMissions directories and such. Now I can just put Arma2 in the library, and hard link the profile folder into there, along with the appdata folder. I think that will be a pretty fast explorer workflow.