Hi,

I bought and started SMAX, and realized the terranx.exe has "Run as Administrator" in its preferences. So any time I start SMAX I give it all rights and UAC clocks in.

Is this really necessary? I removed the run as admin flag and it seems to work.

Anyone knowing?

I'm on Win7x64

TIA

Hi,

You'll probably run in all sorts of trouble if you do not run as admin, like settings not saved, games not saved, etc.
I don't know if you can avoid UAC by granting the AC folder certain permissions but maybe you can.
Best is to avoid all this stuff by installing it somewhere else then %:\Program Files%.

From my own experience, it should run fine without Admin permissions as long as it isn't installed to the "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)" folders - current GoG installers generally install to a "GoG Games" folder - and you keep your save games in the default folder used by the game.

This really should be fixed. A game shouldn't be using elevated (admin) permissions to run.

Any comment from GoG support?

Every game (at least those released before UAC was released) needs to do it. Plus, UAC itself is more trouble than it's worth, so you're better off deactivating it entirely.

Most pre-UAC games were programmed under assumption that they had full read/write access to their respective installation folders and thus config files and saves were either put directly in installation folder or one of it's subfolders. UAC prevents write access to folders under program files so you may encounter all sorts of problems if you install pre-UAC games there. GOG installer automatically assigning run as admin setting is workaround to fix the issue (as this gives the program write access they need to function correctly).

Alternate solution is, as Garran above says, installing games outside program files folders. Then admin privileges should not be needed. I always recommend doing so with all games, new or old. No need to pull out hair dealing with problems caused by UAC.

One thing to note: If running the game through WINE on Linux, admin (root) privileges are not needed.

(Of course, this only works for games that actually run under WINE, but fortunately, most older games do.)