Running winsetup as a "default" user

[Dave Gilbert]

Hi all!  I've noticed that Winsetup.exe can only be run on Vista if your windows user account is set to "Administrator."  Is there any way around this?  The error message says to right-click on properties and to select "run as administrator" but that option is greyed-out.

Any help on this is much appreciated.  We're trying to get our game onto a big distribution portal and they are refusing to take the game because of this.

Edit: Additional info. You can RUN the application fine, but you get the error message if you click the save button.

[Dave Gilbert]

Anyone?

Fortunately I begged the portal into letting this slide, but I am still wondering if it is possible to do this.

[xenogia]

What about right clicking on the winsetup.exe and selecting run as administrator.  But I guess this really doesn't help the solution.

[Khris]

The error message says to right-click on properties and to select "run as administrator" but that option is greyed-out.

[xenogia]

I'm not with it today.. lol

[Gilbert]

I'm not quite sure about Vista, but will this work if you include a batch file as an alternative work around, containing the following line?

GAMENAME --setup

Last resort. Stick a line in the manual, telling the users to type in the line themselves in a command prompt (hope that it won't require solving a 15-panel puzzle to be able to launch the command prompt in Vista) if nothing else works.

Management of rights on Windows has become more and more stupid recent. I hope CJ could comment on this and give a better suggestion.

Edit: I think this is probably because of the .cfg has to be saved in the game's own directory (I don't know whether this is the case under Vista). There was a reason (a very stupid one, IMO) to move saved games and other output files (such screenshots) to the horrible "My Documents" directory.

[Dualnames]

*SmartAss*

Why don't you use SSH's GameSetup module?
It uses a vbscript which you can link onto a shortcut and magic can really happen IN-GAME SETTINGS

[abstauber]

I still wonder, why this happens. I know that it's not possible to create new files in the game folder, but modifying existing ones?
Does the default user have no write-permission at all?

edit
I just had a few tries myself and in Windows 7, right-click "run as admin" works perfectly fine. (AGS 3.2)

So how about modifying the installer and check if the user has admin priviledges. If the user hasn't, simply install the game to his/her user directory.

Here's a blog entry describing it:
http://www.kinook.com/blog/?p=53

I can also upload my just created AeroNuts Testinstaller if you like to take a closer look.

[Dave Gilbert]

Adjusting the installer is, unfortunately, not an option.  To clarify, this isn't for me or my customer base.  It's for the portals and their customer base.  The portal in question (Oberon) deals with several dozen games a month, and they wrap each game in their own installer system.  It's understandable that they don't want to make adjustments for each and every game that comes their way, so each game has to adhere to their criteria.  Draconian and annoying, but true.

Fortunately, I convinced them that their users will very rarely (if at all) need to use the winsetup.exe file, or even know it's there.  So they let me remove the winsetup.exe file entirely from the build so it will still meet their criteria.

I just had a few tries myself and in Windows 7, right-click "run as admin" works perfectly fine. (AGS 3.2)

I'm using version 3.1.2.  Maybe this was fixed in the current version?  If so, then I won't have to worry about it in the future.  Yay!

[Vince Twelve]

Just thinking out loud here.  I think you could make the game itself modify the configuration file to, say, toggle between full screen and windows.  It wouldn't take effect, obviously until the game shut down and restarted, so you'd have pop up a box that says the game will shut down and the player will have to start the game again.

Obviously not ideal since the game can't restart itself automatically, but you could even implement something that makes an auto save before shut down, then on restart it could load the save and get you right back to wherever you were.

Something to think about for future games?

Edit: though now that I think about it further, it's quite possible that the game would also not be able to write to the config file due to the security settings unless the game was run in admin mode.  So... maybe not.  Blah.

[Pumaman]

The simplest solution to this is to configure the installer to grant Everyone Write permissions on the acsetup.cfg file, which will allow the Winsetup program to work.

But as it sounds like you're not allowed to do this, unfortunately removing the winsetup program or getting people to right-click, Run As Administrator are probably the only viable options.