Error Loop Upon Setup, Fixed by changing install directory

[generalvikus]

I installed RTW2 in the following path: D/Program Files (86)/Rule the Waves 2, and when starting a game I encountered the following problems:

When starting a game without the 'manual build of legacy fleet' option selected, the following sequence of errors appeared: 













They go on repeating like this, as far as I can tell forever - or perhaps for every ship that is built. 

When I started a game with 'manual legacy fleet build' selected, the same sort of errors appear as soon as I am finished creating my legacy fleet. 

These errors occured regardless of which nation I select, or whether a 1900 or 1920 start is selected, and regardless of which save slot is selected.

When attempting to auto-generate a ship design, I received this error:



As far as I can tell, they rendered the game entirely unplayable for me. 

This issue was solved entirely by copying the game to C/Program Files (86)/Rule the Waves 2. 

[williammiller]

This is a Windows 'behavior' issue I think, not specifically limited to RTW2:

If you install a legacy application (like RTW2) into the 'Program Files(x86)' folder, Windows will re-direct your save games to another folder - in my experience this can sometimes cause permission or other issues with save games.

[rimbecano]

The weird thing in this case is that the system Program Files folder is usually on C:, but in this case it seems to be on D: (of course, you can have a folder named "Program Files" anywhere, but only one of them is going to be used as the software installation directory by the system).

The reason Windows now redirects writes to Program Files is that it is generally considered unsafe to have directories visible to all users and containing executable code be writable by anyone but administrative users. This wasn't a huge issue in the DOS and early Win9x days when PCs were generally single-user and didn't have 24-7 Internet connections, so there got to be a tradition of having all the files related to a program (code, configuration, savegames, etc.) all in one directory. But this wasn't safe in multi-user environments or when the computer was network connected, so Microsoft made Program Files read only and redirected writes to that folder from non-administrative users elsewhere. It's preferable for a program to keep only code and read-only data in Program Files, and to store read/write data like configuration, savegames, etc. in the user's AppData folder. OSes that have been multi-user and/or networked from day one (such as the Unix family) generally have had separation of code and writable data from the start, and thus haven't needed to redirect writes to their equivalent of Program Files, because developers never got used to being able to write to such directories in the first place.

As long as they're not on a multi-user system, users can avoid issues with Program Files being read only by installing programs that write to their install directory into C:\Users\insertUsernameHere instead of into Program Files, as long as there aren't other users on the machine that will want to run the same program.

Note that C: in the above path should be replaced with whatever drive Windows has its Users\ directory on.