[krang213]

I just bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl off of Steam last night; I've been wanting to play this game for some time now. I booted it up, it loads all right, and I edited some of the settings to fit me. I changed the graphical settings to max, changed the resolution to 1920x1200, and changed the light to Full Dynamic. The game told me that I would have to restart for the lighting changes to take effect, so I did. When I booted the game back up, all my settings had reverted to default: medium graphics settings, 1024x768 resolution, Static lighting. This continues to occur, and it also sets the difficulty to Master - I haven't even PLAYED the game yet, let alone mastered it.

After restarting a couple times (solving nothing) I decided to screw it and play the game anyway. All the settings were at max except for lighting, which had to remain static. I got about twenty minutes in, using the autosave feature about every 5 minutes, and saving through the menu once. After a battle my character died, and I tried to quickload, but that didn't work. I looked in the save menu and found that NONE of my saves, auto or menu, had actually recorded any info - I had no saves. NOTHING about this game is being preserved on my machine!
I'm the Administrator and UAC is turned off (I know, I'm a bad boy) and none of my other Steam games, or any games, have this problem. STALKER has the latest patch for the downloaded version on it (1.005) and my machine is top of the line (see below or my profile for specs). WTF!? This game is really fun and as I'm learning to be a game designer, I could learn a lot by playing it. I could really use some help here, plzkthx?

Computer Stats:
Vista Ultimate 64-bit, Q9650, 4GB RAM, eVGA nVidia GTX 295, 1.5TB HDD, SB Audigy, Thermaltake XaserVI Case
High-end stuff, if you have any other questions about my rig or dilemma, let me know. Thanks!

[leroys1000]

Sounds like it may be having permission problems
writing to the configuration files.
Try right clicking the game icon and click run as
administrator and see if it retains the settings.

[krang213]

UAC is turned off, the "Run As Administrator" option is grayed out. If I right click right on the .exe file and select to Run As Admin, the same problem occurs with no help.

[neofan3]

Stalker worked fine on my winXP pro x64. I ran it at 1680x1050. Except for the controls, everything else is pretty much as default. I wonder if you don't max everything out, do you still have the same problem?

[krang213]

It doesn't matter what I set the settings to, the problems the same even if I set them to the lowest setting. The problem arises because the game can't save any data to my system, so all my changes (including in-game saves) are lost when I restart the game.

[neofan3]

Have you restarted your computer. Do it a few times it may help. It helped me when I had a similar problem a few mos ago with "fall out".

[krang213]

Yes, I've restarted several times.

[neofan3]

Have you tried to reinstall the game? It may or may not work but I think it is worth to try.

[krang213]

That doesn't work, either.