Post by blarglol on Jul 19, 2024 17:48:30 GMT -6
bobrose williammiller Fredrik W - I believe I have solved the issue finally. Bob you were sort of right. Unbeknownst to me, my C:\Users\*username* was ***NOT*** what was actually my real username, my local account name. It was instead the first few letters of an old Microsoft Account username from an email.
So, while this didn't seem to affect any other programs or applications that I could detect, it appeared that RTW3 (at least after a certain update for whatever reason) was susceptible to being affected by this. To remedy the situation I had to do the following.
1. You must first create another local account with admin privileges. On Windows 10 they try and hide this because they WANT you to use a MS account. Go to Settings, Accounts, "Family & other users," "Add someone else to this PC."
2. Then when they try and get you to use a MS account, hit "I don't have this person's sign-in information." Then click "Add a user without a Microsoft account," and set the name password, and security questions.
3. Give it admin privileges by finding it now under "Other users" in your settings, and click the button "Change account type." There should be a dropdown menu that will allow you to select "Administrator."
4. Log into your new user account, let it do it's dumb setup stuff. Reveal hidden files in this account by going to your file browser, view, options, change folder and search options, view, show hidden files folders and drives
5. Go to C:\Users\ and manually rename the old user account from whatever it was with the MS account, to what it's supposed to be.
**WARNING** I take no liability for whatever this will do to some things on your machine, particularly if you are very plugged into the MS ecosystem and use OneDrive and stuff like that. This worked for me because I run a very minimalist machine connected to the bare minimum of services possible, doing most things manually myself
6. Lastly, go to Registry Editor. In there, go to here: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and look at the options under that in the dropdown. They will be numbers and letters, but you can read on the right what is in them. Next to the line "ProfileImagePath" on one of these things, you should see the username you want to change. Right click ProfileImagePath and select modify. Type in the new name so C:\Users\etc is what it should be. Restart your PC, and go into your old account, now with a new name in C!
With any luck, if you try RTW3 now, preferences should now save. TLDR - Microsoft accounts screw up the user account path and for whatever reason RTW3 is very susceptible to being confused by this, seemingly moreso than more modern programs. Hope this helps!
Also - unlike before, now my saves and preference file are in C:\Users\*username*\Documents\My Games\Rule the Waves 3. Prior to this tweak, they were not going there and what was in Documents was truncated and functionally useless.
Perhaps a post on the FAQ might be in order to help with this issue?