How to make UDK work on a shared computer

[harryjohnston]

Hi,

I'm installing UDK on a number of teaching lab computers. UDK is not working, probably because the users don't have write permissions on the C:\UDK folder. When they launch the UDK Editor, it silently quits without displaying anything at all.

Because these machines are used by many different students, any sort of tatooing is not allowed - that is, when the user logs out, nothing of theirs can be left behind on the hard disk. Documents, application data, and roaming profiles are stored on the server. Available disk space on the server is too low to give each student their own complete copy of UDK, and I doubt it would run fast enough over the network anyway.

Ideally there would be a single read-only copy of the UDK executables and content on the hard disk, and the students would be able to store all their own content, including levels, configuration settings, and so on, in their Documents folder on the server. Is there any way to do this?

Harry.

[JessieG]

Custom content needs to go in the content folder within the UDK directory to be available without having to reload.

At my school every computer had UDK installed on the machine using an admin account, but students need to save their packages and levels to the desktop or a designated folder in their server space. The issue with this is the package needs to be opened first, then the level. Their content is never stored on the computers.

This is a good setup for them to just build levels on the art side of things, but unless they have access to the directory in the C drive, they really can't do any coding.

I believe there are restrictions you can use that allow them to create files on the C drive, but they can't install or uninstall new programs without admin approval. My school does this, but with different classes in the same computer labs, no one saves documents on the C drive anyway.

[harryjohnston]

Thanks for the advice. The problem with allowing people write access to the UDK folder isn't that they might install other software in it, but that they might (probably unintentionally) break UDK in some way. Certainly one person's content shouldn't be visible to anyone else. It would also mean that computer viruses could spread from one person to another via the UDK executables.

I can work around the problem with temporary folders and junction points, but it means copying the entire UDK each time someone wants to use it, which (since it's three and a bit gigabytes) is rather slow. I was hoping there was a better solution.

[darthviper107]

It might be possible to have UDK installed to a flash drive, however, if the components required to run UDK aren't installed on the actual machine then it won't work (Like DirectX)

[JessieG]

We never had any virus problems with that access. I don't know how your students are, but at my school everyone knows not to mess with the C drive even though it's technically available to everyone.