Funnily enough, not just the fact that users and developers need to care about drive letters, the drive C: itself is called drive C: because drives A: and B: were reserved for floppy drives. And I don't think many machines have had floppy drives in the 2000's.<p>Linux has had a unified directory tree since the early 90's where it completely doesn't matter which drives host which directories. Implementing such a tree on Windows and mapping "C:", "D:" etc. as pseudo-roots to suitable locations to make it backwards compatible would not be an insurmountable task. Surely not trivial, but even on Windows application programs do not write to physical drives directly which gives the filesystem an opportunity to do any path translations it wants to. Thus, the question becomes a matter of will: Why hasn't Microsoft considered it important to fix their drive accesses?<p>What do they see as the advantage of having drives mapped to drive letters? It's certainly not usability: Linux can produce "drive icons" for each mounted drive. You plug in a USB stick and its icon shows up on the desktop――all this <i>regardless of whether</i> the USB stick is actually mounted in /mnt/$STICK or /media/$USER/$STICK or wherever.<p>They could also support mounting extra drives to directories under C: so that the user would never have to deal with other drive letters. The "C:" would just be a historical prefix but in practice it wouldn't matter because you could mount your second disk at C:\Program Files\ and the applications wouldn't even know about it. I vaguely remember that WinNT kernel could actually do this, however it's apparently well-hidden from users because I don't see this having been set up anywhere.
Probably not a deal breaker for most, but it seems a little weird that they didn't plan for this. Surely a relatively small SSD for OS + large HDD for games etc. isn't that unusual for Oculus' target market?
Wow... The Sea Drive. Brings back memories of those weird systems I had to use in the dark, distant past, where programs had to inexplicably be aware of what physical device a file was on in order to access it.
Odd that the twitchy front page of /r/Oculus made it's way on the front page here, but I'll echo the ever-present Oculus founder's response that addressing this is pretty high on their roadmap. Sauce: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4bd31n/oculus_software_and_vr_applications_must_be/d18dw80" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4bd31n/oculus_softw...</a>
<i>>This is near the very top of our roadmap ... we are still in the process of rolling out our support pages, don't take anything as final yet.</i>
FWIW, this looks like it might only apply to games purchased through Oculus Home, the Steam equivalent for the Oculus Rift (or perhaps the UPlay equivalent). Games/experiences that aren't distributed via Oculus Home (SteamVR, Steam games w/ Oculus support, independently distributed games) appear to not be beholden to this limitation.