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I am new to Linux and REALLY new to POL so if I am asking something that is common sense or ignorant then forgive me.  I am attempting to create multiple installs of a game on POL so that I can play it in several windows with different accounts.  This should be a simple method to fill up a squad all by myself and use in game macros to command all accounts.  I did this years ago with World of Warcraft to level up toons and run instances by myself and am looking to do something similar today.  This should work with any game compatible with POL I just can't figure out how to create multiple seperate installations of the same game so that I can load more than one game at a time.  HELP ME POL FORUM!!!  I've been trying to figure this out for days!

Hi, I haven't tried anything like that, but some things in PlayOnLinux model won't help:

- install scripts decide of the virtual drive name used for installation; So they can manage a [i]single[/i] installation of each program;

- installing the same program more than once in a single prefix looks less appealing, because it won't benefit from virtual drive's isolation; However if you try this, the second problem is that shortcuts creation will not necessarily pick the program you choose if they're more than one instance of that name into the virtual drive. In scripts one may work around that by specifying a subpath, but that's not even a possibility with manual shortcuts creation.

With that in mind, I think the best route would be:

- install your game normally once;

- go into ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/ and copy the whole game "prefix" (should appear like a subdirectory there) as many times as needed;

- at that point the new instances will lack shortcuts. If installation did not require any shortcut tweaks (POL_Shortcut_InsertBeforeWine, etc.) then extra shortcuts can be created manually: Configure button > (select virtual drive) > General tab > Make shortcut from this virtual drive. If shortcuts are tweaked, you'll have to go into ~/.PlayOnLinux/shortcuts/, copy the shortcut(s), then edit them to change the virtual drive paths.

Hope it helps.

Thanks Petch but unfortunately the only thing this did was make a bunch of copies that crash Wine.  When executing one of the copies it crashes wine and says I should contact the program developers...  The copy simply doesn't function.

Well, I did what I should have started with in the first place, try the procedure myself!

I used what I had at hand, namely an installation of League of Legends.

I will had one step to the procedure, because by default virtual drives are not really isolated; On the contrary Wine tries to integrate into the host environment, so it maps some directories ("Documents", "My music", etc.) to Linux "equivalent" directories using symlinks. So to avoid sharing unexpectedly files between the copies, I recommend installing the PrivateUserDirs pseudo component in the virtual drive before the copies, it will replace those symlinks with plain directories.

So the whole procedure was:

- Install the game (here LoL)

- Install PrivateUserDirs into it: Configure button > (select game virtual drive, here LeagueOfLegends) > Install components tab > PrivateUserDirs > Install button

- cd ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix

- cp -av LeagueOfLegends LeagueOfLegendsCopy

- since League of Legends shortcut is not tweaked, I just created a shortcut from scratch for the copy: Configure button > (select copy virtual drive, here LeagueOfLegendsCopy) > General tab > Make a shortcut from this virtual drive > lol.launcher.admin.exe > League of Legends 2

 

 

I'm new on Linux too and your answers helped me a lot. So I just wanted to say thank you

You're welcome :)