Stuck settings...

[Kagehi]

<p>Seems to be some people that have data glitches, or something in their settings. I talked to one person that says the state of if their cloak is visible or not is stuck in one setting. They click it, so its working the way they want, then log out, and the next time they log in, its back to the wrong setting. I have myself ran into the same issue with the setting for "Hide my illusionary form". At least one other person I know of seems to have the issue too. The setting simply won't save at all. The next day, you log back in, and its right back to "do hide", when I turned it off the prior day.</p><p>Any simple way to fix this? Where is the setting stored, if you can edit it? It certainly isn't in any of the xml files for GUI, or system settings, or other things.</p><p>-Note- I already put in a petition on this two days back, but didn't get EQ2 mail, or any other indication that someone was looking into it, so figured I would take a look here. I am guessing that its corrupt data, where ever its stored, and the corruption is resulting in a) the new setting not being written back to the file, without any indication of failure, and b) old settings being read in, but only those that are recognizable by the client.</p><p>Its more an annoyance than anything, but, would be nice to see a fix for it. And, hopefully not one that requires redownloading gigs of files for my expansions, as a result of having to reinstall something.</p><p>Thanks.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p>make sure your settings files are not set to read only</p>

[TSR-WilliamS]

<p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>make sure your settings files are not set to read only</p></blockquote><p>This is great advice.</p><p>Kagehi, could I have you post your results here. So others will know whether or not these steps work? </p>

[Kagehi]

<p>Wish setting file am I looking for? The one that seems to contain masses of binary data?</p><p>Oh, and where exactly? I am pretty sure the files are all in the EQ2 directory, not buried in {user}Application Data, but not sure. In any case, nothing that looks like a setting file in the EQ2 directory seems to be locked. I'll see if maybe I have a copy of attrib on this machine and can look for if any files at all are in there.</p>

[Kagehi]

<p>Ok. This is one of the things confusing me:</p><p>A          D:Program FilesSonyEverQuest IInektulos_kageriso_eq2_uisettings.ini A          D:Program FilesSonyEverQuest IINektulos_Kageriso_eq2_uisettings.xmlA    R     D:Program FilesSonyEverQuest IIoriginal_uisettings.ini</p><p>I presume the top two are supposed to contain the same data? The ini contains binary, which I can't decifer, while the xml is plain text (as it should be), however, the xml file **does not contain settings from the Persona tab**. Note the "R" for read only is next to the original settings, but not the other two.</p><p>There is also eq2_recent.ini, which is plain text, an contains a huge mass of information on video settings and other things under the primary options tab, it also has the read only bit turned off, so can't be the problem. And, again, nothing in it contains settings from the Persona options menu. Then eq2.ini has all of 3 lines in it, none tied to this group of settings.</p><p>There doesn't seem to be anything containing any other settings. As far as I can tell, there isn't anything that has the settings from the Persona tab stored in them locally, that I can find any place. Well, unless I am looking for the one file that EQ2 insists on puting some place "other" than its own folder, or something. <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Kagehi]

<p>Hmm. So.. I am guessing that no one knows where these things are stored, including the people working for SoE? lol Seriously though. Until I can find what file, if any, contains the specific settings in question, and this is seriously *not* obvious, unlike the rest, I am at a dead end here.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p>My guess is that this is a Windows Vista/7 machine?  If so, the fact that it is in the program files directory is probably the issue.   Anything placed in that folder will have additional security if you are using one of those operating systems.  You might want to try moving the game to a different folder like C:Games.  Then we'll want to turn off the read-only tag, at which point it should not come back.</p><p>Here is the procedure I would recommend for disabling the read-only flag(after moving the game folder outside of program files):</p><p>1. Navigate to the Everquest 2 folder2. Right click that folder and select 'properties'3. Go to the 'General' tab4. Uncheck the box that says 'read-only' at the bottom of that window5. Select 'apply to all files/folders' when prompted</p><p>After doing that, make sure you start the game by right clicking and selecting 'run as an administrator'.  The settings should be saved from that point forward.</p>

[Barx]

<p>I could be wrong, but I don't think the persona window settings are stored in the persona window, I want to say at least some of them are server-side.</p><p>Also, the .ini file that is in binary is old, you can delete it. The game will only use the xml file now <em>unless</em> all that it has is the old ini file (at which point it resaves it as a new xml file).</p>

[Kagehi]

<p><cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>My guess is that this is a Windows Vista/7 machine?  If so, the fact that it is in the program files directory is probably the issue.   Anything placed in that folder will have additional security if you are using one of those operating systems.  You might want to try moving the game to a different folder like C:Games.  Then we'll want to turn off the read-only tag, at which point it should not come back.</p><p>Here is the procedure I would recommend for disabling the read-only flag(after moving the game folder outside of program files):</p><p>1. Navigate to the Everquest 2 folder2. Right click that folder and select 'properties'3. Go to the 'General' tab4. Uncheck the box that says 'read-only' at the bottom of that window5. Select 'apply to all files/folders' when prompted</p><p>After doing that, make sure you start the game by right clicking and selecting 'run as an administrator'.  The settings should be saved from that point forward.</p></blockquote><p>You would be wrong. I am using XP. Vista got so much bad press, not the least being, "Don't install this if you don't upgrade your processor, since your games will run horribly", that I wouldn't have bothered with it, even if I **had to** have Halo 2. When 3 didn't even come out for PC, I said f-it. lol I might go to 7 at some point, but I am well aware of the issues with this stuff on those machines.</p><p>I tend to suspect that Barx is correct. These settings are **not** stored on the local machine at all, and the problem is something going wrong in the server data for the character. I.e., its gotten corrupted on your end, and so EQ2s internal error catching is resettings certain items back to defaults, only, the corrupted data in the DB never gets fixed, so the next time it attempts to write that portion of the data back, it fails with an error, and nothing is updated. Since its quite likely that character data is stored in separate DBs, like:</p><p>login data -> character ID key, plus other stuff.</p><p>character ID key -> levels.character ID key -> items.character ID key -> house stuff.character ID key -> persona settings.</p><p>A failure to correctly write data to the DB that handles the persona settings will have "no effect" on updates to the half dozen other DBs, which are used to hold all the other information. If persona settings had been stored in the same DB as the levels/skills, etc. DB, then we would be seeing huge numbers of people screaming that they gained X skill last night, but this morning it wasn't there any more, or that their money kept disappearing, or.. pretty much a whole host of problems.</p><p>In any case, since the settings do not appear to be located "at all" in the EQ2 directory (You know, it would have helped things a lot if someone had **confirmed** they where, instead of assuming they where), they have to be on the server, and someone either isn't logging, isn't reading the logs, or has otherwise failed to notice corruption in the DB which handles these non-critical settings. After all, there isn't a lot "in" those settings that does more than effect the cosmetic aspects of the game experience, like whether or not bows, cloaks, illusion forms, etc. show up. If it directly effected game play... you might be seeing more instances of this issue coming up.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p>If you haven't already, you'll probably want to submit a petition to the GMs with this information.  The in game team typically has connections with the devs/QA so that they can submit this type of issue to be corrected. </p>