Not an earth-shattering problem, but annoying me...

I complete the Troll Idol quest and return the idol to the troll king - fine.

Then when I go up or down a dungeon staircase to a new level, my weapon disappears from my hand (and inventory). It was an enchanted weapon (bone powder).

Tried experimenting - if I leave the weapon on that level, go up or down a level and then come back, it's gone again from whereever I left it.

Seem to have pin-pointed it to the idol as the problem. I was holding/using the weapon when I killed the would-be king who comes to trash me, and it's almost like from that moment on that the 'bug' begins.

Anyone else experienced this? Know any way around it (it's a good wepon, that's all)?

I think I'm having the same problem. After returning the idol, I lose all the short swords in my inventory upon switching levels. I killed the would be king with a short sword. Annoying indeed. :|

I can confirm the problem, I had the exact same issue, but in my case it was just with ordinary short sword.

I also found after this (mentioning it here because it could be related) that the next time I went to the blacksmith in town to sell unwanted pieces of equipment, all items I previously sold him had disappeared (some had been stacked with existing items after I sold mine), just as if the shop inventory had been reset.

In the other thread you mentioned you use Arx Libertatis, right? Do you have a save file from (directly) before the item disappeared? That would help greatly with tracking this bug down.

My nearest save left before that is from a few hours before, I can take that one and get it back to just before the bug trigger.

What would you prefer: save before killing the would-be king, before talking to the goblin king, or before giving the idol to the troll king ?

Whichever save allows reproducing the bug :)

ok, so what I will do is 1 save just before killing the would be king as this seem ti be the trigger of the bug, and 1 save just before changing map when the bug will appear.

AS for the saves themselves, there was a save folder within Arx Fatalis, but I do not find one within Arx Libertatis ?

Saves are in the following location:

%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Arx Libertatis

Or, if you're still on XP:

%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Games\Arx Libertatis

You can enter these paths in any folder address bar to jump right to it.

I see...

I am not keen on saved games moved to the profile... I rather like the old way of them being in a subfolder of the game itself; if that was a modification by Arx Libertatis, there should be an option for the player to decide which way it is.

Besides this, on Windows 7 (and probably higger), there is a limited size system partition, and a larger size partition for applications; anything assigned automatically to the system partition is a bad thing since too many things on it will eventually clog it.

Yes, those should be fine. Thats not really a good option with modern operating systems as the game directory should not be writable for normal users - and you should absolutely not run games with elevated privileges. There is, but there is no GUI/installer option - and I don't think there needs to be.

1. First off, the save game folder is not hard-coded. Windows Vista and newer have a per-user setting for where games should store their saves (FOLDERID_SavedGames) and AL respects that - the default is %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games. I'm not entirely sure where this can be changed though, but it should be possible. Changing this setting will also affect other games that put their save files in that location.

2. You can set the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ArxLibertatis\UserDir (system-wide) or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ArxLibertatis\UserDir (per-user) registry keys to overwrite the default save game location for AL.

3. Finally, the --user-dir=... command-line option can be used to overrule all other settings. This can be used by editing the Arx Libertatis shortcut.

For more details see the Data directories page on our wiki. And the user profile is on the limited-size system partition? That seems like an odd setup. I have Windows 7 installed on just one partition and didn't need to do anything special during setup, so it's certainly not required. Either way, I agree that hard-coding the save location would not be a good idea.

Microsoft has set up 2 parttions in default installation since Vista, and all pre-installed installations (like the one on the laptop I am currently using) come that way, therefore there is no user choice.
As for a fresh install of Windows 7 on a new hard drive, it will also do this unless you chose otherwise during the installation; this can be verified by simply using your search engine with the string:
Windows 7 installed on just one partition

The only situation to my knowledge wher you would not have to do anything to install WIndows 7 on a single partition is if you made an upgrade from XP or older.

Fair enough.

Hm, I must have misremembered then. Definitely didn't upgrade from XP, but I probably partitioned the drive before installing Windows 7.

Either way though, I still think the 'Saved Games' folder is the best location as that's what the overlords at Microsoft recommend and afaik use for their own games. And if it becomes too big for the partition it is on it can be moved or changed with the registry keys or command-line option. I guess this could be done in the installer, but that's not really my area. If you think this would be worth the effort, feel free to file a feature request with as much details as possible - remember that the installer needs to make it work for all users while the save dir is usually a per-user setting.

If you are referring to the System Reserved partition you misunderstand its purpose. It is used for storing the recovery environment tools and some other special files used in the case of problems. It is not used for any everyday storage; all other system and user data is still stored in the main OS partition as in previous versions.

Using workarounds prevents the creation of this partition but not its data, which the installer instead puts on the OS partition. You end up with it either way, and having it as its own partition is preferable for technical reasons (which is why this is the default behaviour).

No, I was not referring to this but to the partitions created by the default Windows 7 installation for C: (OS partition) and D: (user data partition), with all default installation of programs as well as user settings, and here save games doing their best to clog up this limited size OS partition.

Oh, now I see what you're meaning. This is due to the OEM's configuration and/or doing an upgrade install. Doing a clean install of Windows 7 from original media (rather than the OEM's recovery partition or disc backups) will make only a single partition per drive (barring weird hardware arrangements--some OEMs ship systems with a single partition made up of two physical drives, so reinstalling without the OEM's tools may make it mysteriously split into its two original parts).

In any case you can move the location of Saved Games, Documents and other standard user folders through the Location tab of their properties. This setting is per-folder so you can move just the ones you want, so even if the system is configured for two partitions you can redirect user data to another partition as required without having to adjust the physical partitions to free up space. All games and applications will automatically see the redirected folders' new locations and interact with them normally as if nothing had changed.