DescentBB

Have been running D3 under Win98 for a while but recent upgrade to XP is causing problems.
Have reinstalled D3 under XP so now when I go to play, the launcher tells me that I have to set my default detail levels. Fair enough, I go through the set up tabs and set them all, OK them and try to play, only to find that I get exactly the same message about default detail.
Is XP not remembering the preferences I set?

Do you have permissions to install in XP?

CDN_Merlin wrote:Do you have permissions to install in XP?

Yes, I installed as administrator. The software all seemed to install ok (ie new directory set up and all files transferred over).

You might need to do the configuration as Administrator as well, depending on where D3 is trying to write to in the registry.

DCrazy wrote:You might need to do the configuration as Administrator as well, depending on where D3 is trying to write to in the registry.

Ah-ha! Yes, thanks, that gets me past where I was stuck before.
However, I seem to have progressed only to some new problems!
1. First tried playing as administrator. This first told me that my pilot was too new ... I presume that this is because I reinstalled on top of my previous directory, so keeping my save games and pilots. Anyway, I followed D3s request to delete my pilots,and now I can play new games but can't load my saved games. Because they are specific to the pilots? Is there any way I can get round this? (I have copies of my pilot files, if there is any way of fooling the programme to accept them). I really really don't want to have to start all over again!
2. Second tried playind using my more normal XP user account (ie not as administrator). The launcher by now does seem to have kept the preferences set when I started up as administrator, however pressing "play" from D3s launcher brought up an error message "failed to create registry key". I guess that I could always play as administrator, but it'll continue to annoy me if I can't figure out why I can't play as other users.

Just giove your user account admin rights. Also, don't forget to patch to version 1.4 then copy back your other pilot files.

CDN_Merlin wrote:Just giove your user account admin rights. Also, don't forget to patch to version 1.4 then copy back your other pilot files.

I'm probably wrong, but I thought that Microsoft suggested using administrator only for - well, administrating. Better not to go online as administrator as lower security. OK, not relevant for playing single player descent, but I was working on basis that best to set everything up to be used as non-administrator.

More importantly, patching back to 1.4 has sorted out the pilot/savegame problem ... I thought that I'd already done the patching, but must have overlooked it. Cheers!

No, but using an account with admin privileges without a strong password is stupid.