non-Administrator accounts to run the game

#1 Good! that sounds like a winner to me, let us know how it turns out in the end! Oh wait, is there a question involved here. I see it, sneaky.

Here i re post this for you, as i know little about Vista and never thought to test launching TGEA under sub accounts.

Hello, I am trying to support non-Administrator accounts to run our games, because there are a lot of users who cannot run games as Administrators on Windows Vista, could someone offer suggestions?

#2 So... Could someone offer suggestions? It's not like Vista is something new and exciting in the marketplace. And it's not like requiring admin is reasonable anymore -- even the default account does not have admin privileges on most Vista installs.
Or is it the case that Torque TGE or TGEA games simply don't work on Vista?

#3 TGEA runs fine on Vista with a standard user account. The only issue I can see is installing it. The TGEA SDK installer that you download from here seems to request Administrator privileges for some reason or other, but you can create an installer to install your game that doesn't require it.

#4

Quote:TGEA runs fine on Vista with a standard user account.

Last I checked, it tried to save configurations and save games in the program files folder, which won't work right with standard user accounts. Specifically, your preferences changes and game saves (!) will be lost the next time you start the game.

Is that now fixed?

#5 That's not anything broken. It makes sense to keep things that way for development purposes so all of your files are in an easily accessible hierarchy. Changing where the preferences and game saves are written to is trivial, and something you should do on any platform. I wouldn't think it would be too much to expect that developers developing games have at least enough competence on their target platforms to setup proper data directories before deploying.

What I find to be a good practice is to have your installer application create a game-specific folder under the users Documents/My Games folder. How you do that will depend on what installer application you're using. And setup your game to read/write all data files from there. Alternatively you could have it read/write the data from the AppData folder, but Documents/My Games makes it easier for the user to copy their preferences and saved games to other computers if they want.

#6 so whats the deal then? does tgea just not run under normal vista accounts or is it just the file writing permissions?

the bug description hints towards the first case... havent tried it myself yet. its a bit late now though :(

#7 No TGEA runs fine on standard Vista accounts. I've got 3 Vista boxes here that I test on with standard user accounts and it runs fine on all of them. Vista only allows non-elevated processes to write to certain areas of the primary system drive though, so you do need to configure your game to do any file writing to one of those areas. Generally somewhere within the current user's home directory.

There is a handy static method Platform::getUserHomeDirectory() that will return the user's home directory on any of the platforms that are supported. This method is exposed to script via the getUserHomeDirectory function.

#8 Alrighty! Thank you :)