[Jeff Vader]

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

[jr2]

Hmm, I was assuming he re-installed to the same (\Games\) location, right-o, that could be it.. 

[Molaris]

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.

[jr2]

Is there an easy way to get FSO to ask for admin priviledge elevation when it needs it?

[Cyborg17]

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.....

[niffiwan]

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.

[The E]

This is something we plan to do, actually.

[Iss Mneur]

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).

[Mongoose]

Oh lord, FS2's going to become another one of those programs that I raeg at for dumping folders into My Documents.

[niffiwan]

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 

[The E]

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.

[Mongoose]

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. )  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.

[Molaris]

wow, did I actually start a relevant thread? I thought it was a dumb newb question X-P correct me if I'm wrong

[Goober5000]

The thread-starting question was not dumb...

wow, did I actually start a relevant thread?

...but that one was.

[Molaris]

lol, thanks for clarifying Gooder5000 :-P