Matrix Games Forums

Lesson learned. I will be quiet. And concerning "absolute amateurish mistake", I apologize. That was definitely too harsh.

ORIGINAL: deep42

Thanks for sharing your opinions.

Nevertheless I think the solution is one of the worst of all bad solutions. You punish all those security aware guys, who doesn't want to use an admin account for daily work. And it would be so easy to get it right.

All application specfic data like scenarios should go to the ProgramData (AllUsers) folder, only user specific data like save files should go into the documents folder. Moreover even user scenarios could remain in the documents\My games folder. With some lines of additional program code scenarios could be loaded from both folders. That would be juts two folders and I think it should be easy to give those scenerio developers some hints in the manual to get them going. Alle other users wouldn't even be aware of those two folders.

Now as it is like it is, the installer should at least give a warning if a user tries to install with a non-admin account.

but this is Windows and we need to use what works best for Windows.

I agree, but the current solution definitvily doesn't work and it violates all OS guidelines.

Just my two cents.

the Combat Mission games have been doing this since Fortress Italy.

Combat Mission is from 2007. Times change and you do not have to copy anything, that someone did wrong in the past.

-Peter

Oh boy, a security discussion [:D]

It was a judgment call on those. I felt it was better for this game to put all the user modifiable data in one place the users could find (Documents) instead of splitting them into two places, two places would make things more confusing when people wanted to modify things. It's the same reason I didn't leave them under the program files folder where they were for a while.

I felt it was the lesser of the two evils and would reduce support and confusion by putting everything in one place and my documents was the obvious place for something as moddable as TOAW.

Could I have split them into ProgramData and My Documents? Absolute, the code actually allows for multiple locations so it wouldn't even be difficult.

What happened here is that for some reason the installer actually ran under the context of the admin user, and not just with the permissions of the admin user. The files were installed to the admin users my documents folder. That makes absolutely no sense to me. The setup program should install the files to the user that requested the action. Once things calm down I want to reproduce and research that behavior to see why it's happening. I'm hoping it's a setting on the setup program, if it's more than that, I'll have to figure out what to do.

I fully understand what you're saying and if TOAW weren't so moddable, I'd agree with you. In this case, I think we need to agree to disagree.

I'll revisit this if I do a TOAW 5 and see where Windows is and if the same decision still makes sense.

Ralph

Ran into this as well. Had to run TOAW IV specifically as an administrator to get it to run.

This is very suboptimal in 2018, when tons of other games which are AAA+ titles are happy running at security restricted levels (War Thunder); and given the increasing threat profiles -- I do a lot of running around the internet to find things for research; so I have to employ "best of" practices for a work environment.

My game starts only in Admin mode, it seems. Without that, it will freeze upon start up before the "new game..." dialogue appears. Win 10 64 bit (German), installing and running the game from a different account than the admin one.
If checking for updates from the Launcher (which requires admin rights password) first and launching afterwards, game will start correctly, same as well when setting "launch as admin" in the .exe properties.

Working as intended? Would be nice to start it without having to enter the admin password every time.

Here's how to run TOAW IV in "restricted" mode without having to run as admin every time.

Load your admin account.

Go to
DOCUMENTS
MY GAMES
THE OPERATIONAL ART OF WAR IV

You'll see a lot of shit there that's not in your "public" game folder.

Zip all that shit up into a file, and place that zipped file in a area of your hard drive accessible by your standard user account.

Log out of admin and go into standard user.

Find the ZIP file and unzip it into your standard user account.

What's happening is that it is trying to load the scenarios and other things from your standard user account DOCUMENT/MY GAMES folder, and it's not finding them there, so it hangs.

Copying them over from your admin account fixes that.