Adding EU4 directory to settings.cfg is confusing

[sapi]

Defer the check for directory validity until the GUI has appeared, then immediately prompt to change the directory if it appears to be invalid.

On windows, could possibly try to read it out of the registry.

Consider doing so for other settings keys as well.

[zeress]

You could ask the user on first startup for it as well, as some people will have EU4 elsewhere installed and possibly running than the steam folder

[sapi]

Yeah, that's true.

The ideal situation, I think, would be to default the setting to a null value (say, an empty string), and prompt to select a directory on startup if this is the case. (This could be defaulted to the directory in the registry on Windows, although it's annoying to have to make it OS-specific.)

The annoying thing about this is that the settings are currently checked for validity before the GUI is initialised. In retrospect, though, that doesn't work too well for people who expect a popup on error (rather than printing to stderr).

[gbasood]

If the program fails to find the directory in the config file, it should ideally fail more gracefully. At the moment it simply crashes with a stack trace in console which wouldn't be able to be read unless you ran the program from the console.

Possibly a separate issue, actually.