Crash when attempting to edit ships from deploy screen

Gratuitous Forum Support
21

just posting to say this is still happening with 1.29 with the exact same error (can’t save _temp_deployment)

as before, process monitor shows that it can’t save it because it’s trying to write the file inside “program files(x86)\gratuitous space battles”, which it has no business trying to write to
any idea how long the fix for this is going to take?

22

gave up waiting for this to be fixed and just installed the game somewhere else, so the “can’t write as a normal user” restrictions of the Program Files directory don’t apply, but the bug is still there and will affect anyone on XP who isn’t an admin on their machine, or anyone running as a limited user on vista or above if the file virtualisation backwards-compatibility hack isn’t working

23

I think that I’m having this problem as well on 1.35. Unfortunately, I’m not an admin on my machine. I’ll have to try installing the game on another machine (where I am admin) and see if it happens.

Lately, the game’s just been crashing a lot :frowning:

24

The problem, illegal write access to \Gratuitous Space Battles_temp_deployment in Window’s programs directoy, still exists in version 1.59.

I’m slightly surprised that this hasn’t been fixed after two years. Are there that few people creating new designs from the deployment screen? Or is everyone simply running Windows with administrator privileges, so no one notices? (Ok, the latter would perfectly run with the unstoppable virus plague on Windows in general.)

A work around for anyone who’s sane in his head and does not play as admin:

  1. Login as admin.
  2. Navigate to Windows’ program directory, usually c:\program files or the like.
  3. Right click on Gratuitous Space Battles, select Properties from the menu.
  4. Select the security tab.
  5. Grant full access to all users.

If you’re running Windows XP Home, use http://www.fajo.de/main/en/software/fajo-xp-fse to enable the Security tab.

25

The other thing UAC does, apart from making admins not have admin powers, is to silently redirect these kinds of writes (for admins and non-admins alike) to their personal userspace. So it’s very difficult to see this bug on win7 or vista, unless you turn UAC off and run as a non-admin user (or unless windows has decided not to do file redirection for GSB, like it did for me).

The author of GSB apparently feels that because vista/win7 will work around his hacky code for 99% of people, he shouldn’t actually fix it to not suck, even if it’s a clear bug with simple reproduction steps. This explains why galactic conquest is now essentially unusable for me, since it’s more unstable than an elephant on a unicycle.