STEAM Sync: Can you NOT sync your game settings?

[nE0n1nja]

Hello, STEAM sync is of course very useful and great, but I was wondering if there is any option to disable the synchronization of your game settings, but still sync your saves?

My laptop is weaker than my desktop, so every time I switch to play on my laptop, I need to dial down the settings so I can get good frame rates.. Then when I play again on my desktop, I again need to turn the settings up. It's pretty annoying.

[Kargor]

Unfortunately, no. Steam syncs whatever the game considers to be save files.

I'm not even sure whether Steam would be the correct place to address this kind of bug. Technically, the games should be careful to put "game state" data into the save files, and "settings" data into a local settings file or the registry. Unfortunately, that's not what happens :-(

In the end, Steam cloud is far less useful than it appears to be because of this.

It also seems the game industry "never learns". The had similar problems back when they didn't make a distinction between putting global installation information into the registry HKLM branch, and per-user settings into HKCU (or, likewise, the installation directory and the user directory), causing games to require "admin privileges" (or forcing users to adapt the privileges on systems like XP Pro).

At least one Need for Speed even went so far as to create a directory hierarchy on C: (hardcoded, of course), with subdirectories containing the user names. Apparently they had realized that there can be more than one user on a system, and those users want their own settings and saves -- but they failed to understand the operating system mechanics: this would only work for administrative users, and is completely pointless anyway since Windows already has per-user directories that they could and should have used...

Games are such complex things, and they manage it perfectly well, but they fail on such trivial parts :-(

[nE0n1nja]

Oh well :(. I was hoping that I'm missing something. It would be excellent if they manage to fix it in the future.. It might seem like a small issue, but if you often switch between devices it becomes a real pain in the ass.
Currently I'm playing Darksiders II and it doesn't have a lot of settings to tweak, so it's somewhat manageable, but imagine some of the games with complicated settings.. It would be impossible.

[Peto]

Im into this problem. Still hoping for some good solution :(