General Question Vista and saving scn files

[Andy44]

Wierd thing: When I exit out of Orbiter, it autosaves the current scenario like it's supposed to.

When I go to open up the (Current state).scn file for editing, though, it has a last modified date of August 2009, which is about when I copied my Orbiter setup onto my new Vista machine. Inside, the contents of the file are all an old save from August, and it seems that Orbiter is not writing to this file.

But when I restart Orbiter, it's starts with the proper scenario state, the one it last exited with.

So if the (Current state).scn file is not being modified, where is Orbiter getting the scenario from? And how to find it?

 

[Hielor]

Wierd thing: When I exit out of Orbiter, it autosaves the current scenario like it's supposed to.

When I go to open up the (Current state).scn file for editing, though, it has a last modified date of August 2009, which is about when I copied my Orbiter setup onto my new Vista machine. Inside, the contents of the file are all an old save from August, and it seems that Orbiter is not writing to this file.

But when I restart Orbiter, it's starts with the proper scenario state, the one it last exited with.

So if the (Current state).scn file is not being modified, where is Orbiter getting the scenario from? And how to find it?

I assume you have Orbiter under Program Files?

If so, navigate to the Orbiter directory in Explorer and hit the "Compatibility Files" button near the top of the explorer window.

Best way to take care of this is to put Orbiter somewhere other than program files. I personally like "C:\Games" for stuff like this (so "C:\Games\Orbiter 2006")

 

[dbeachy1]

It should be writing current state to $ORBITER_ROOT\Scenarios\(Current state).scn. So for example if your Orbiter is installed to C:\Orbiter, it would be C:\Orbiter\Scenarios\(Current state).scn. If you don't want to mess with virtual store directories like Hielor mentioned above, you can just install Orbiter to a normal directory outside of Program Files and then run from there.

 

[Andy44]

Wow, I suppose this is a Vista "feature": to make it as confusing as heck for XP users!

I'll do what you guys say and move it to a different location. That should solve a whole bunch of wierd problems.

 

[Hielor]

Wow, I suppose this is a Vista "feature": to make it as confusing as heck for XP users!

I'll do what you guys say and move it to a different location. That should solve a whole bunch of wierd problems.

You can also turn off UAC, I think that'll take care of it.

(TL;DR warning, if you're not technically minded you can stop here)
The purpose here (I think) was to prevent malicious software from overwriting things in the Program Files directory, so it's effectively treated as read-only and new writes to it (sometimes) go to that alternate folder, which is under <SystemDrive>\ProgramData.

According to the published standards for writing applications for Windows, stored program data should go into a user-specific location, so different users won't be running into each other's config files (and so it'll work when not run on an administrator account). However, even though these standards have been out since before XP, lots of programs would write config files or save games (for example) to their Program Files directory--a sort of culture has developed with the attitude that a program's program files directory belongs to that program, even though writes to that directory would fail even on XP (or earlier) if the user wasn't an administrator.

In Vista, this was more heavily enforced with the implicit redirection; however, it doesn't always work as well as it ought to. Some programs will find the old version of the file rather than the new one (one particularly annoying game I remember was Jedi Academy--config changes would be lost upon exiting the game), or fail to find new files they've written.

Personally, I think a better solution would've been to allow a program to do whatever they want with files in their own Program Files dir, but not to other dirs. This has been the single most annoying "feature" with Vista, and unfortunately didn't change in Win7.

My solution has just been to put games and things that are likely to be doing this sort of thing into C:\Games. In some ways putting things there is actually nice, since it keeps them more organized rather than having to sort through eleventy hundred folders in a years-old Program Files directory.

 

[flytandem]

I remember being driven nuts for a couple of hours when I started using Vista and tried to do the the same as Andy is doing. Yes, it came down to user account control (UAC) as suggested above. It saved the scenario files into a virtual directory that the program knew where to find it so it all looked fine until you wanted to manually modify a scenario file. I googled a lot of things that day including "Bill Gates Punching Bag".

 

[RisingFury]

I know Bill Gates is on the board of directors... but does he still have a say in how things are done? Doesn't he run the Bil and Linda Gates foundation pretty much full time now?

 

[Hielor]

I know Bill Gates is on the board of directors... but does he still have a say in how things are done?

No, not as far as I know.

 

[Andy44]

Well, frustration like this makes you want to hate on somebody, and Bill Gates is as good as any other celebrity.