User needed to run release build as administrator for save to work on Windows 11

Unity Engine
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1

Not sure what the deal here is, but I was recently contacted by a player of my game saying they couldn’t get past the file select screen on Windows 11. They had purchased and installed the game through Steam.

My assumption was that there was some sort of error saving files that was causing the file select script to break. I asked them to find and send the Player.log file, but they didn’t find one, in fact the entire persistent data path folder was empty.

As a last ditch effort I suggested they find the .exe in steamapps and enable “Run as administrator” and somehow this worked.

I don’t understand how this could be an issue? I didn’t think an app needed administrative permissions to write to an AppData folder. I’ve never had anyone else complain about this issue and I doubt this was the first person to run the game on Windows 11, but I have to wonder if this is an issue with the game or just a strange issue on the user’s end. The build that they were running was built with Unity 2020.3.11f.

I’ll have access to a new Windows 11 PC soon, so I’ll be able to test it out myself, but either way I’m curious if anyone might have any ideas as to why this happened.

2

This is bizarre and unexpected. We haven’t seen issues like these on Windows 11 machines (in fact, I use Windows 11 on my main workstation). Perhaps they could launch the game with “-logFile \player.log” where would be a location they definitely have write access to? I wonder if this could be some weird permission issues on a multiuser system.

3

Well, I got access to a brand new Windows 11 PC, set up two user accounts, and tried installing and playing the current release version of the game on a non-admin account, no issues.

I’ll consider sending them an email seeing if they can investigate with the custom log launch parameter, but ultimately I don’t think it’s a big issue. Computers are weird!

4

It really does sound like permissions got borked in the user’s home path, AppData, or AppData/LocalLow. Either someone or some program messed with permissions (changing the owner of those folders), or it could be random HDD data damage.