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[celebrinborn]

This is a cross post from the minecraft forums. I am also posting here because I am much more familiar with these boards (I come here all the time but I almost never go to the minecraft forums) and because there are some very computer savvy people here.
Long Version:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I play dwarf fortress and that game has an exporter that will export dwarf fortress levels into minecraft indev levels. However, the exported maps are indev maps which forces me to downgrade minecraft to indev. The problem is that I also play the current version of minecraft. From what I understand, to launch minecraft I launch the minecraft.exe application, which then loads the .minecraft contents from appdata/roaming/.minecraft. Currently, if I want to switch between the two versions, I have to first back up my current version, and then delete everything in the current .minecraft folder and replace it with the contents from the other version's backup folder. I think that this method takes too long and is too complicated. This brings me to my question; is there a way to trick the .exe into loading the file from a different folder? From what I understand, one method would be to replace the .minecraft file with a link to a different folder, and then just change where the link goes to before I launch minecraft (I believe that this feature is either known as a junction point or an lnk file, however I'm not sure which one if either is correct). One redirect would send it to indev minecraft, the other link would send it to current minecraft. This could be accomplished with a small program that will first ask me what version I want to load, and will then delete the old redirect file and replace it with a redirect to the version I want to load (still just as complicated, however as it is only changing a single small file it will be much faster than copy pasting everything in the .minecraft folder). I was wondering if there was a superior way to do this and if not, how would I go about making the link file. Thanks.
PS: It sounds like the next version of df2minecraft might be compatible with the current version of minecraft. Regardless, still I want to learn how to do something like this simply for the sake of learning it (and because I've needed to do stuff like this before and not known how)
Edit: just found out I will still need to use indev

SHORT VERSION:
The things I want to learn are:

1. Could I change the .minecraft folder so that minecraft.exe will try to load from .minecraft but will instead be tricked into loading files from somewhere else? I assume that this would be accomplished by using some sort of link or redirect.
2. If so, what would I need to look into to be able to do this? Are junction points the right thing to be looking at? .lnk files? or do I need to be looking in a different direction?

PS: I have experience in C++ programming and some limited experience with working with .bat files. I have never worked with junction points or stuff like that before however I would very much like to learn.

PS is this the right place for this? If not, where should it go? Thanks

[alfie275]

I'm pretty sure junction points will allow a folder to act like a shortcut as it were (you can even have folders contain themselves and stuff), if that doesn't work, you could always mod minecraft.

[alway]

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/9814-portable-minecraft-minecraft-on-your-usb-key
^ That is what you need. Allows you to redirect the location it treats as the .minecraft folder's parent directory. Just create 2 directories (you could even put them on the desktop to avoid digging through AppData), and then you have 2 copies of minecraft, each with their own batch file you run to start up one of them.

It's really easy; can be set up in about a minute; and gives you a fully portable minecraft directory which can be copied and pasted anywhere without fear of contaminating the other minecraft directories on your machine.

I personally use it because our university computers have our AppData folder on the network drive, and so putting the folder on the local drive allows for much more smooth gameplay.

[celebrinborn]

Thanks everyone