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General FreeSpace => FreeSpace & FreeSpace Open Support => Topic started by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:24:52 pm

Title: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:24:52 pm
I'm trying to reinstall freespace 2 and the FS2 Open. I had it installed before but some mods had errors and would not run (like Blue Planet 2 would not let me play as the cruiser), so I decided to reinstall and pray for the best. I copied the ENTIRE original installation and put it into a new folder (C:\Games\FS2 SCP Backup\Freespace 2 or something like that). Uninstalled the game and deleted the remaining files. I reinstalled it and tried to run it to see if it would work and I ran into issue 1.

The Pilot selection said to name myself "callsign" and when I tried to, it failed to save, saying that there wasn't enough memory and would crash. (which is bull, cause there's 91 gigs of space left on my C drive). After 3-4 unstalls and reinstalls, I'm still at mostly at square 1 (other than I can actually log in now). I thought maybe the backup was causing some issue so I moved it. I had been running other programs so I stopped that. then i restarted after the 3rd/4th installation (cause I had been running FRED2 with Inferno Mod prior to the reinstall). I can get in and play, but when I log out it says failed to save pilot (the pilot file is in the folder though).

I'm really getting frustrated cause I know the stupid installer will take like 12 freaking hours to install EVERYTHING available. The FS2_open installer says that FS2 wasn't installed right. what am I doing wrong?!??
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: The E on September 07, 2011, 02:29:22 pm
The reason it failed to save is a bug in the savegame creation process. Go to the Fs2 directory, and open the data folder there. Create the following directories: players/single/inferno and players/multi/inferno, so that the final directory structure looks like this:

Code: [Select]
data
 |->players
        |->single
        |       |->inferno
        | 
        |->multi
                |->inferno
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:30:55 pm
and that is for basic FS2?
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: The E on September 07, 2011, 02:33:30 pm
Yes. This step is necessary for FS2_Open 3.6.12 to function correctly. In addition, if you encounter other issues, please refer to this FAQ (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=56279.0), which will cover most of the commonly encountered issues seen with FSO installs.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:34:20 pm
k, thanks. I'm rather irked cause this seems like it shouldn't be an issue. with a basic FS2 install, I should be good to go (i'd think), but oh well. thank you.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:35:05 pm
that and the installer taking 10-12 hours into install everything FS2-O has is kinda a drag too :-\
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: The E on September 07, 2011, 02:42:20 pm
Can't be helped. We only have a finite amount of money, and unfortunately not a lot of it to buy bandwidth.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 07, 2011, 02:44:26 pm
Not to mention that you shouldn't be using the installer in the first place, as it is depreciated. All tutorials should be pointing here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=47640.0)
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:44:41 pm
oh, ok. sry bout that. didn't know that
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 02:53:09 pm
wow, now the FS2 open installer refuses to run.....crap
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 03:00:13 pm
k, I'm just putting the back up back. thanks "The E" for the help. I dunno what was going on with FS2 retail, but it just hated me. lol
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 03:05:46 pm
wait, so that FS2 Open installer isn't working currently?!??! ooooh.....that might explain a couple things...
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Jeff Vader on September 07, 2011, 03:37:29 pm
wait, so that FS2 Open installer isn't working currently?!??!
Yes.

Also, there is the option to MODIFY your posts, which is much appreciated if no one has had time to respond after your previous post.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Goober5000 on September 07, 2011, 07:35:39 pm
Not to mention that you shouldn't be using the installer in the first place, as it is depreciated.
False.  The installer works well enough, but the domain is down at the moment.  And a new version is being coded anyway.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 07, 2011, 09:27:55 pm
so should I just wait til FS2_O is recoded?

as an update: I have deleted EVERYTHING Freespace 2 related and reinstalled retail FS2. I do the setup, it works like a charm. after I quit and try to reload, I get the whole "failed to save pilot" crap again. and have had the video settings put back to 640x480 (had it set on 32 bit 1024x768). do I need to run it in a compatibility mod?

this makes like the 5th reinstall today and i keep having issues with retail FS2 and I am REALLY losing my patience with it.

thanks for all your feedback guys. I dunno what to do and more in likely you know WAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than I do. I appreciate it
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: jr2 on September 08, 2011, 12:53:06 pm
Your retail FS2, is it from a disk?  Is it patched to version 1.20?  What OS are you running?
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 08, 2011, 12:54:53 pm
FS2 retail is known to not being able to start on systems with too much RAM (says something about detecting only -1MB RAM). Use FSO, not the retail exe.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 08, 2011, 05:40:30 pm
I'm running windows 7. My father thought that part of the problem is that, for whatever reason, it doesn't have rights to right to that folder. I ran it as an administrator and I have no issues now :-\. thanks all! and yeah, I gotta get FSO, but I wanna wait til the Installer is up again (since it's being recoded). that was easier, just time consuming.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Jeff Vader on September 09, 2011, 12:22:11 am
\Program files\ and \Program files (x86)\ are problematic. If you have your FreeSpace in either folder, I'd recommend cut-pasting it to C:\Games\freespace2\ or something like that.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: jr2 on September 09, 2011, 04:01:11 pm
I copied the ENTIRE original installation and put it into a new folder (C:\Games\FS2 SCP Backup\Freespace 2 or something like that).
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Jeff Vader on September 09, 2011, 04:04:03 pm
so I decided to reinstall and pray for the best. I copied the ENTIRE original installation and put it into a new folder (C:\Games\FS2 SCP Backup\Freespace 2 or something like that). Uninstalled the game and deleted the remaining files. I reinstalled it and tried to run it to see if it would work
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: jr2 on September 09, 2011, 04:10:34 pm
Hmm, I was assuming he re-installed to the same (\Games\) location, right-o, that could be it..  :nod:
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on September 29, 2011, 01:17:15 pm
sry guys. I'm not trying to be a pain (kinda happens though unintentionally, lol) I'm just new to all of this. I did reinstall yes, and i had been installing to my games folder. it needed admin rights to be able to save the pilot data. soon as I ran as admin, the issue was gone.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: jr2 on September 29, 2011, 01:22:56 pm
Is there an easy way to get FSO to ask for admin priviledge elevation when it needs it?
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Cyborg17 on September 29, 2011, 04:33:02 pm
XP has a feature where you right click on an exe and select "Run As".  If you have the password for the Administration account then that program will be given Administrative powers.  This may exist in Windows 7, but I have yet to upgrade.....
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: niffiwan on September 29, 2011, 04:37:43 pm
Win7 does have "run as administrator", shift-rightclick.

As for requesting admin privilege escalation in order to write pilot data, probably not a great idea because you're getting waaaay more rights than you need.  I think having FSO write the pilot data to a different location like (on win7) c:\users\USERNAME would probably be best - similar to what the Mac/Linux versions do.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: The E on September 30, 2011, 01:03:57 am
This is something we plan to do, actually.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Iss Mneur on September 30, 2011, 08:39:09 pm
This is something we plan to do, actually.
Indeed, of course installing FSO into a location that it is able to write to without administrator privileges makes a good work around (like your profile).
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Mongoose on October 01, 2011, 01:45:46 am
Oh lord, FS2's going to become another one of those programs that I raeg at for dumping folders into My Documents. :(
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: niffiwan on October 01, 2011, 02:15:22 am
I used to think this way and it used to drive me nuts too ;)

However, from a security, "don't run everything as admin" point of view, it's actually quite sensible.  "Program Files" is writable by admin only.  Savegames, cache & other data is put into your writable per-user home directory i.e. "My Documents".  Makes it harder to get someone adding a trojan to your programs, because you should get a UAC pop-up whenever anything tries to write to something in "Program Files" - if you're logged in as a non admin user, if you haven't rage-disabled UAC, etc  :P
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: The E on October 01, 2011, 03:08:37 am
Oh lord, FS2's going to become another one of those programs that I raeg at for dumping folders into My Documents. :(

Umm, No. I think we're going to be following Microsofts' advice and use %APPDATA%, which usually evaluates to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Mongoose on October 01, 2011, 02:06:55 pm
Ah, okay.  I'm still running XP, so that should resolve to \Documents and Settings\*Me*\Application Data.  (Means I don't have to deal with UAC barking at me, either. :p)  There are several games/programs, including Firefox, that dump new folders directly into My Documents, which is a massive pet peeve of mine, since (surprisingly enough) that's where I keep documents that I want, not random game settings.  From a broader standpoint, I know why programs started using the individual user folder, but I tend to find it rather counter-intuitive, since I'm so used to looking in a game's program folder to find stuff related to it.
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on October 08, 2011, 09:06:07 pm
wow, did I actually start a relevant thread? I thought it was a dumb newb question X-P correct me if I'm wrong
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Goober5000 on October 09, 2011, 05:10:30 am
The thread-starting question was not dumb...

wow, did I actually start a relevant thread?

...but that one was. :p
Title: Re: failed install
Post by: Molaris on October 10, 2011, 04:33:28 pm
lol, thanks for clarifying Gooder5000 :-P