Custom Workshop/Mods/Object Folders

Basically, i do run DA on my main SSD, and as it’s known, repeated writting over an SSD will chip away it’s lifespam faster.

If i’m, for exemple, exploring various custom maps and objects from Steam Workshop i end up having to add, normally, a great deal of objects that may be deleted soon after.

Some softwares, allow us to, for exemple, have a folder on another Drive (let’s say, an healthy HDD that may slow down loading assets, but will not lose health over various downloads/writting on it).

If we could, for exemple, download once through the Workshop, and be able to move those assets into a folder on another Drive, this would mean we only have to write over the SSD once per Workshop download.

Setting up this inside D.A cold work like this.

On the options menu have an “Asset Destination”, where you point to a folder on any driver. Then opening an map with those assets, it’ll always look there first for assets for a map.

If they are not there, it’ll look on the normal steam workshop folder.

Later, there could be a button, to “Move from Steam Workshop to Assets Folder”, leaving only an dummy, 1kb file on the Workshop Folder, that allows steam to see the Asset there and not re-download it.

Could be a good thing, and i know it would be a little more convoluted, to have a repository outside steam Workshop, similar to how Nexus Mods or ModDB works? But then they would be populated by users of course.
But, for having an external asset source, it would be necessary an “Custom Assets” folder that D.A can see.

Right now, i’m gonna test a syslink folder to try making anything that steam workshop downloads to be actually be saved on my HDD, but i don’t know if it’ll work.

And yes i know, again, this would have an impact on loading, but i would prefer to have a longer loading time then chipping away SSD health, specially when Hardware is getting so expensive nowadays.

Lastly, i would say that, it could be a useful toggle, if a Custom Asset Folder is created, for us to be able to toggle, either on map creation, opening a map or even on a map, in the Objects menu, the ability to “Look Into Custom Assets Folder”

This could even help, for some people, to have their own Custom Assets on a folder and Workshop Assets on another, and use both on the same map.