Restricting Games (Dofus, World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, Half Life,...)

Admin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:25:53 GMT

Sometimes, you'll discover that selecting a game from the user's or the shared start menu (by using the From user's start menu items or From common start menu items options) is not enough. Many games are started in an unusual way: when you double-click the game shortcut in the Start Menu or on the Windows desktop, you are not actually launching the game but the game launcher which in turn launches the actual game. So if you restrict the game launcher, this will not prevent the game from running. The restrictions will apply to the game launcher only and since it is present in memory only during a few seconds, this will not be very useful. In such cases, you should select the program to restrict by using one of these two methods:

Launch the game and while it is running, launch PC TimeWatch. In the Program selection dialog box, chose either the From window list or From running processes method. You should be able to identify the window name or the process name corresponding to the game's main window.
If method #1 doesn't work, then select By exe name. You don't need to launch the game before in that case. This assumes that you know the name of the game executable. Again, this should be the executable name of the game itself, not the launcher. For example, the process name of World of Warcraft is wow.exe. You can identify the game executable name by opening the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc - Processes tab), sorting the processes by name (click on the Image Name column header), launching the game and identifying the new process that has just appeared in the Task Manager window.

The DOFUS game is a special case. The developers have named the program executable DOFUS.DLL. If you restrict DOFUS.EXE, you are actually restricting the game launcher. To restrict DOFUS itself use the From window list method. Half Life and Counter Strike also use a launcher: the launcher executable is named steam.exe. Again, if you restrict steam.exe, you'll not restrict the game itself. Use one of the two methods described above.

Then proceed as usual for assigning time slots and/or time allocation to the program.

Special Note for Dofus 2.0:

Dofus 2.0 behaves differently than the previous version. First, it's not DOFUS.DLL that must be restricted but DOFUS.EXE. Moreover, when DOFUS is launched, PC TimeWatch "sees" 2 images of the process in memory. This is due to a technical problem generated by a Dofus companion program, reg.exe. So the allocated time is counted down twice as quickly as it should. The only workaround for the moment is to allocate twice the time that you actually want to allocate to DOFUS.

This article also applies to some games installed by Windows like Internet Reversi.

FAQ (read only)

Restricting Games (Dofus, World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, Half Life,...)