Those who play on Windows cannot have two versions of the game installed, as the installation program detects old installations and does not allow installing without removing the previous one. Now that the new version is close and we need to test it, I thought it would be a good idea to share this with you.
To avoid this, all you need to do is change the name of the folder where the game is installed before installing the desired new version.
Here's a step by step guide:
1) locate and rename your current 0ad folder. In my case, it is installed in a custom path. The default path is probably something like C:\Program Files\0ad alpha<version>\
from this:
to this:
2) Run the new 0ad installation file. It will ask you to remove the older version. You just click Ok/Accept
3) The installation wizard will attempt to install the new version at the previous folder. You might want to change this to the new version number.
4) When the installation is complete, you can rename the old folder back to its original name.
from this:
to this:
5) You will now have the shortcut to the new version you installed in your start menu by default. If you want, you can create a shortcut of the old version to the location you want to access it more quickly.
Assuming you named the old folder "0 A.D. alpha 26", the executable will be located in the following path:
\0 A.D. alpha 26\binaries\system\
example of my two desktop's shortcuts
Now when we start a27 it will probably send us to the Mods section and ask us to disable the mods that are not compatible. By just disabling them, we can play our new version without any problems.
5) Additional step (not necessary)
@Norse_Harold Shared with me this trick to avoid having to enable and disable mods every time we start a different version.
This step is not necessary, but it makes things a little easier and requires some kind of knowledge to not mess things up. If you don't feel comfortable with this, just don't do it. You'll just have to enable and disable your mods whenever you want to open another version. But it does make things easier if you're switching between versions repeatedly.
0ad saves all our custom settings in the following paths:
C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\Documents\My Games\0ad
C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\0ad
C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\AppData\Local\0ad
So what we can do is rename the 0ad folders according to the version of 0ad that we have previously installed, and then create new empty folders that we will name according to the new version that we install. In the example the previous version we had was 26 and the new one was 27 so we will rename the original folder to "0ad26" and create a new empty folder called "0ad27"
Here is the screenshot of the first path, but you need to do the same for the other two paths (Roaming and Local):
As you can see, I have two folders called 0ad26 and 0ad27, each corresponding to its version. And additionally, I have a symlink called "0ad" created by the batch files I'm sharing. Note that you cannot make a symlink from the Windows Explorer as shortcuts. You have to do it from the command line. Therefore, it is very convenient to use a batch file that reproduces the commands so you avoid having to rewrite them every time you want to perform this operation.
This symlinks takes you to one of the two folders, depending on which version of 0ad we want to open.
You may need to edit the batch files and change some paths defined in the variables of both files, depending on your Windows configuration. These files need administrator permissions to work properly. So you will need to right-click run as administrator
Again, this last step is not necessary and you can avoid it.
Batch26.bat Batch27.bat