189 replies to this topic

[Jarno Mikkola]

Not only is there no need to do any kind of editing in Win7 compared to other Windows versions

But we are not talking about compatibility in the big picture... we are talking about playing the historic game with the current machine and to the top of it's abilities. Like 1920x1200 resolution, using the 8Gb memory, etc. and not about emulating a Commodore 64 with Windows7 x64, cause there is at least 1024(or is it 1048576?) reasons not to do it. Yeah, the game is 10+ years old, but the mods can make their own demands if you wish to take everything out of the computer.

but there's still no reason to turn off UAC. Click yes when asked to elevate and everything works, simple as that. If you turn UAC OFF in Windows 7, all it does is auto-elevate for you - it basically just does the "Click yes" bit and forces you to reboot to toggle it off/on. Now if there were a lot of UAC elevation prompts for BWP I could understand, but there's only the one.

Yeah, but unfortunately we are not all computer geniuses that can understand everything the BiG World Install.bat does with all it's lines, and thus know what to do if this or that mod didn't install and what to do about it in every instance.
And believe me, most people don't read the manuals that should come with every purchase... cause we wish to use the computer, not marvel all the tech that goes into it.

Yes, it would be fine if there was just one "Click yes", but the last time I did this sort of cheese, I was promped 10-50 time before I quit the BiG World Install.bat, as the questions came from the different mod tools(.exe's) the mods use to recode their files as .wav etc.

PS. The crash you got - sure that wasn't from converting XMs to WAV?

The crash had nothing to do with the sound files, it had everything to do with the extra folder I had in my baldur.ini's [Alias] directions while I had the right CD in drive during the installation... as apparently the CD drive can't store the data while the mods are being installed... as actually the changes would need to be done to the game folder, and the crash comes from the game file being upgraded(chitin.key) while the data was not, which gives you an assertion error. Ah I remembered wrong, that crash, well it rammed into that interruption after the BiG World Install.bat had already installed more than a few mods, and see, you can't restart the .bat unless you wish to edit the .bat by hand and that demands a lot of knowledge, wisdom and patience which I obviously didn't at the time have, and should you know, I used the same trick as I did with the Vista, in other words, turning off the User Account Control to the minimum. It was the easiest and cleanest operation... and it definitely worked!!

Of course I welcome any input on the matters, but I am quite sure that in this case, the solution I propose is easiest for everyone.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 03 September 2010 - 12:44 AM.

[dabus]

Well, I don't really call myself a guy with "batch-wisdom", but I think all you have to do is:

Keep the SET-stuff at the beginning until you reach

:: Every choice-key may be used only one single time..

Delete all lines until you reach

:BWSStart

This line was added some time ago to show the BWS that the real installation starts from the following lines. It is not used currently, but you have a nice point that you can stick with.

Now you must know where your installation broke off, so check the Weidu.log.
Delete the lines between :BWSStart and that point.
Save under a different name, hold your fingers crossed and resume your install with the new saved bat.

I don't think that's too hard - at least I would give it a whirl if I could save myself a few hours of waiting. Of course you would have to check why the batch failed in the first instance before trying to resume - resume with a messed up install will still result in a messed up install after all.

[flinx]

You can also use the patch the bigg provided.

What patch? And I thought the mod was dead and abandoned, which is why I suggested the extra check.

[dabus]

OT: It was, but a writer and a coder are found to revive the mod and maybe start with writing a ToB-part and all that stuff. If you take a look at the homepage, a they have added a news-section and updated the design, too.

So I guess they have a ton of work ahead, but it is no long abandoned like before but handed over from lord M (?), who said the lack of enthusiasm to continue hindered any forthcome for a long time.

The patch is right here.

Edited by dabus, 16 February 2010 - 01:35 PM.

[flinx]

The patch is right here.

Thanks Dabus - it's only a couple of days old, which explains it. (Thanks to the bigg too, for the fix).

[flinx]

... I used the same trick as I did with the Vista, in other words, turning off the User Account Control to the minimum. It was the easiest and cleanest operation... and it definitely worked!!

No, it can't have worked. UAC doesn't affect the problem mentioned here at all. It simply doesn't work that way. There is no way to run a 16 bit executable in 64 bit windows, short of running it in a VM like Virtual PC or VMWware. You could skip the mod or simply click through the error messages and the install would continue, but that's still not related to UAC.

Of course I welcome any input on the matters, but I am quite sure that in this case, the solution I propose is easiest for everyone.

How is it a solution when it doesn't actually fix anything? If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Show me a real and reproducible UAC related problem for BWP/Baldur's Gate where you actually have to turn it off instead of hitting "Yes", and I'll agree with you.

I think there's a general lack of understanding on how UAC works. Changing the UAC settings in the Windows Control Panel only affects how you as a user interact with the UAC prompts: what things trigger the prompts, and whether you're asked to allow/block something. UAC related problems with software usually happens because an application needs administrative privileges to run properly, and doesn't have it. If the application is started with normal user privileges it won't work. There's a couple of ways to solve this:

- the application is programmed to be UAC aware and actions that require elevated privileges trigger a UAC prompt
- the user deliberately starts the application with administrative privileges (using the compatibility assistant, right-clicking and selecting "Run as administator", or by editing the shortcut for it)
- activate the hidden administrator account and run everything as an administrator (essentially the same as what people did on XP)

[Himself]

The issues Himself have been experiencing are very reminiscent of this particular problem by the way, so I suggest he install the games to a different folder (I use c:\games of instance) if he's been using defaults.

Always used C:\Games\BGII - SoA, I don't like installing games in the programs folder. Still, turning the compat assistant off was the easiest solution to my files being blocked for edit/replace (claiming ownsership *probably* should do it too.. but I did not try it at the time since it seems a longer process).

Edited by Himself, 16 February 2010 - 08:55 PM.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Could you actually quote me? Like so:

... I used the same trick as I did with the Vista, in other words, turning off the User Account Control to the minimum. It was the easiest and cleanest operation... and it definitely worked!!

No, it can't have worked. UAC doesn't affect the problem mentioned here at all. It simply doesn't work that way. There is no way to run a 16 bit executable in 64 bit windows, short of running it in a VM like Virtual PC or VMWware. You could skip the mod or simply click through the error messages and the install would continue, but that's still not related to UAC.

Of course I welcome any input on the matters, but I am quite sure that in this case, the solution I propose is easiest for everyone.

How is it a solution when it doesn't actually fix anything? If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Show me a real and reproducible UAC related problem for BWP/Baldur's Gate where you actually have to turn it off instead of hitting "Yes", and I'll agree with you.

Now, I never said I was using the x64 system, which I don't, so I still need to turn the UAC off if I am using the BiG World Install.bat to edit the game without me needing to make the cmd.exe so it always starts as the admin... this is also because I don't want my viruses to give themselves the admin right by starting a cmd.exe that hides itself while I do something else.

- activate the hidden administrator account and run everything as an administrator (essentially the same as what people did on XP)

How would you do that? After all, I already started the computer as the Admin!!!! As there is no other profile in the computer. It would be different if I was in a library with a profile per customer, but this is a bit too much.
And if we turn off the UAC(to the lowest setting win W7), we have the same effect... see? We do the same thing, just perhaps in a different way, but I think my way is more easy to follow.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 17 February 2010 - 12:52 AM.

[flinx]

http://www.howtogeek...-windows-vista/

Turning off UAC may actually make what you suggest with the install.bat not work, or at least hide a potential problem. If you run it with UAC enabled (separately from calling it using the BWP script), you'll get lots of prompts every time patch.exe needs to run, but the installation may still fail because you're running the batch file itself as a normal user. If you disable UAC, you won't see any prompts at all, but the batch file will still fail for the same reason. The way to fix this is to simply right-click the bat file and "Run as Administrator".

The entire point of UAC is to give the user the indication that something requires elevated privileges to run. With it enabled, you know that something is wrong because you shouldn't get all those prompts - by running the batch file itself as an admin, you only get one single prompt at the start, and it all works. If you run it with UAC disabled however you never know because any error could scroll by fast, and may end up wasting hours because something in the batch file failed without having admin rights.

To reiterate: turning off UAC only disables the elevation prompts - it doesn't give everything admin rights. Only the admin account I linked to in the beginning of this post does that.

[dabus]

I don't own vista/7 and don't plan to do so, but wouldn't be the best way to execute the cmd as admin, cd to your path and execute the batch there?
I'm not sure if "run as" would really run the batch from within the path where the batch located.
Do bat-files have that extension at all?

[flinx]

I don't own vista/7 and don't plan to do so, but wouldn't be the best way to execute the cmd as admin, cd to your path and execute the batch there?
I'm not sure if "run as" would really run the batch from within the path where the batch located.
Do bat-files have that extension at all?

Normally you'd be right, but the BWP install bat is changed by the install script so that the first thing it does is change to the install folder. This was changed/fixed in 8.2.

[dabus]

Uh, yeah. But it only works with the BWS (if it can run through) and not in general. Also forgot that I did that.

[flinx]

There's also some sort of "application compatibility" in Win 7 that can be a pain (at least was for me), would ask stuff everytime a weidumod.exe was used and sometimes would not allow to delete or replace stuff.. (Can you believe it blocked ToB from replacing baldur.exe? ..go figure)

Just noticed this, and you know, I don't believe this either actually . The program compatibility assistant may be annoying when it appears, but it doesn't block you from doing anything. If you had problems and it showed up, that most likely meant that something else was wrong (like say whether you were running the install using administrator mode), and it was notifying you of a potential problem. It's possible you could actually have used PCA to fix it even.

My recommendation is to instead do a clean install to something other than Program Files, and then reset the user rights, just in case:

- right-click the parent folder (e.g. C:\Games), properties
- security tab, advanced
- owner tab, edit
- change owner to yourusername, check "replace owner on...", OK
- wait for it to finish, exit the dialog boxes and reopen the properties, security tab
- Edit, select Users, Check Allow Full control, OK

[flinx]

Uh, yeah. But it only works with the BWS (if it can run through) and not in general. Also forgot that I did that.

Heh, yeah but if BWS doesn't run properly I'd say you have bigger problems . At any rate, there's nothing stopping you from doing what you suggested in your post in that case.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Turning off UAC may actually make what you suggest with the install.bat not work, or at least hide a potential problem.

But it does work! As I have installed at least 1000 mods with the UAC off and then played the games after... yeah, we are talking about old games like the Baldur's Gate 2(Fallout 2, C&C 2) here, not a new age Dragon Age which have their own system built to the Windows user profile system.

With it enabled, you know that something is wrong because you shouldn't get all those prompts -

But actually we are doing nothing wrong. See, the UAC was made so that the user account control can be made easier, without the need to make a large effort in investing into and learning a network program. So, it's an add on feature, that can be turned off.

To reiterate: turning off UAC only disables the elevation prompts - it doesn't give everything admin rights. Only the admin account I linked to in the beginning of this post does that.

That would be the truth in the new games where the software is installed in a fluid format into the user profiles... etc other idiocity.

Uh, yeah. But it only works with the BWS (if it can run through) and not in general. Also forgot that I did that.

Heh, yeah but if BWS doesn't run properly I'd say you have bigger problems.

He wasn't talking about installation that would include the BiG World Install.bat... see, he was talking about installing a mod by hand. Or so I would assume.

At any rate, there's nothing stopping you from doing what you suggested in your post in that case.

How about time, money, chicks(yeah, being a chicken farmer has it's downside)... _{No I don't think dabus is actually chicken farmer, nor am I.}

Bastardly edit that's not for the flinx's eyes.

Okay let me put it this way: It can't be turned fully off, because you're running as a regular user and not an Administrator (like in XP). "Turning it off" just changes how the Windows user interface interacts, and doesn't really solve the underlying problem. You still need to manually elevate some processes to use administrative privileges because Windows doesn't recognize at run-time that they need it.

Actually it does solve the problem, cause the Windows 7 x84 at least, it removes the option to run anything with the admin privileges as it's done by default(in the lowest option, which we are referring as turning it off).

And if you had actually read the description in the last option, you would know the reason why it needs to be used, the IE game are not certified for the Windows Vista/7, because they do not support the User Account Control. Got you.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 28 October 2010 - 11:30 AM.

[flinx]

See, the UAC was made so that the user account control can be made easier, without the need to make a large effort in investing into and learning a network program. So, it's an add on feature, that can be turned off

Okay let me put it this way: It can't be turned fully off, because you're running as a regular user and not an Administrator (like in XP). "Turning it off" just changes how the Windows user interface interacts, and doesn't really solve the underlying problem. You still need to manually elevate some processes to use administrative privileges because Windows doesn't recognize at run-time that they need it.

The link I gave for how to activate the hidden Admin account is a perfect example - if you try it without elevating the CMD window first, you'll just get an error when trying to perform the command, and there will be no elevation prompts. If a command that needs elevation is ever added to the install.bat or as part of an addon, turning off UAC wouldn't help.

(incidentally I have no idea where "network program" came from - we're talking about stand-alone computers that may or may not be networked)

He wasn't talking about installation that would include the BiG World Install.bat... see, he was talking about installing a mod by hand. Or so I would assume.

Right, which is why I said that what he suggested would work - if you're installing mods by hand and doing a lot of modding of the install procedure, you could also just manually edit the CD line in and avoid the problem. This also has nothing to do with UAC btw .

[Jarno Mikkola]

Will BWP v. 9 run on Windows 7 64 bit?

Yes, just follow the golden line, Install the game to the Games/BWP sub-folder, not into Program Files sub-folders.
And disable the UAC... so you do not have to start anything as the administerator, as the computer is started as the admin(there flinx ). And if you have a virus protection program, it will probably also have to be disabled, as the installer program the mods are installed with has content that the programs think is virus related, but they are false positives as everyone should know.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 21 April 2010 - 02:26 AM.

[the bigg]

Near Infinity launchers: using start javaw -Xmx1024M -jar NearInfinity.jar removes the DOS prompt from the desktop and task bar.