SubTonic on 30/7/2011 at 23:12

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Ahh crap, I forgot to specify at the beginning that it's Thief 2. My apologies, I forgot this board is for the entire series while I was typing this all out.

Like the topic title points out, I've pretty much done everything I can to get this game to work on my machine. It starts up fine, it plays the videos without issue, and I can start a New Game..sometimes, and it runs and looks great.

But it won't load my saves. It will immediately crash upon loading the level. I've yet to traverse far into the level, so I'm not even sure the load screen crash isn't going to come back. That basically involved some graphical glitching occurring around the cursor at the load screen and then crashing two seconds later. I'm not getting that. Yet (It likes to wait until I've played a little bit to start doing that nonsense).

I tweaked with the various settings in the ddfix.ini and USER.cfg to no effect. I'm able to test some settings thanks to New Game usually loading the level (Though it will also sometimes crash to desktop like when I try to load a save) and everything appears to work just fine within the level itself.

I've tried all of the compatibility modes, and I've even tried older versions of ddfix, which actually made the problem worse, so the newest version is definitely the most stable one for me.

I'm running a single core Intel CPU and a Radeon HD4650 on Windows XP Professional. You know, the funny thing is that Thief Gold works. The only thing Thief Gold does is crash on exit, but that's redundant and doesn't bother me. Same version of ddfix for that, too.

I don't get it. I thought Thief 2 would be the more friendly one, since I've had more luck with that game on XP in the past, but I've been doing small upgrades to hardware over the years and, consequently, making the Thief games harder and harder to get working.

Also, as an additional inquiry: As an ATI card user, should I bother with Fog and it's associated fix in ddfix.ini or just leave it be? I've read a little bit about ATI cards not agreeing with the fog.

Anyway, thanks in advance. I've really ran out of ideas at this point, short of trying to run Windows 98 on a virtual machine, but a friend of mine tried this and said it failed, so...drat.

Update 1: Okay, so I progressed further into the mission and made a save, expecting this to trigger the load screen crash. It loaded. Expecting it to crash as soon as I turned around (This also happened with this game), I turned and prepared for the black screen. Nothing. The crashing just disappeared once I made a save further into the mission. Why? What's so special about the beginning area of this mission that causes it to fail to load?

It's much, much too soon to call it fixed, but things are looking more hopeful. I'd still like help if anyone can provide it, as well as an explanation if possible.

Update 2: Encountered an area where it crashes every single time. I get as far as the first guard you're asked to blackjack, and the wooden door near him makes the game crash to desktop when activated. Gah, this is just a giant mess. I'm starting to lose interest in even trying anymore.

SubTonic on 31/7/2011 at 03:23

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Plain install. All I did was install the game, patch to 1.18, then put in ddfix 1.5.11. I extracted it with Winrar and placed it into my Thief 2 folder, and replaced the game's exe with the one provided on the ddfix page.

Seeing as I'm on an old box monitor, I'm trying to run the game in 1024 x 768.

I'm running Service Pack 3 on a 32 bit XP Professional. I tried the multicore fix with no results. The game starts up perfectly normal, intro video and all. I click New Game, select my difficulty, Start, the intro video to Mission 1 plays, I get briefing, it loads the mission.

Here's where things get weird. If I save in the area I start in (outside with Basso) and attempt to load it, the game crashes. If I leave the area and go down the stairs to the back door area, I can save and it will load fine.

I went further in the level, thinking that there was just some problem with the starting area. Snuck past the first two guards and reached the archer, blackjacked him, took his purse, etc. He's standing next to a wooden door, and naturally, my thief's intuition is to hide his body in the room (that and I've played this game before, so I know the room's safe). But when I activate the door, the game immediately crashes. The metal doors at the beginning of the level didn't freak the game out, just that one.

SubTonic on 31/7/2011 at 05:12

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Yes, my cam.cfg has exactly that in it.

As for the game without ddfix, it crashes at the main menu.

I have hardware acceleration off, so no EAX either, and disabling sound did nothing.

The discs are okay, considering how long I've had them. Some minor blemishes, but nothing that should give me such nasty problems.

I guess I'll try tafferpatcher, seeing as my options are quickly running out. It may be a while, though, because failing yet again to get this game running has shot down most of my enthusiasm and I need a bit of a break. I'm not giving up just yet, though.

SubTonic on 31/7/2011 at 23:45

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Well, I installed with Tafferpatcher (which is an amazing tool, I must say) and I got slightly better results. It still crashes when I try and load a save from the starting point, but I went further into the mission, saved, loaded successfully, ran back to the starting point, saved, and loaded successfully again. So I traveled into the interior back to that door that crashed me last time. It didn't crash. However, the metal door before that leading into a metalworks kinda glitched partway into the wall and I had to maneuver myself oddly to get through. I made it into the kitchen before stopping due to a strangely low framerate, likely caused by the visual enhancement packs, so I'm currently reinstalling without them.

I'll upload that save if you'd like, though the crashing seems to be very specific to the situation, as it would crash on load shortly after starting a mission, but if I traveled and came back, it stopped. I really don't understand what could possibly be causing it. Also, I'm forced to run in Windows 2000 compatibility, because running in XP causes the load screen crash. The cursor will leave a trail of glitched pixels behind it within the load file list and crash shortly after. On 95 and 98 modes, the game will freeze on loading. On NT, I get the same results as 2000 (which makes sense, as they have the same structure).

I'll run the scandisk and defragment as suggested, though I doubt either or those will help. About the error, it is the Microsoft Send/Don't Send thing, and I'll see if I can get the details.

Update: Acquired the crash results. Modname: ddfix.dll. Offset: 0000ef4b

The performance drop was indeed the visual pack. Weird, since my system should be more than capable of handling it..I don't really care, though. Thief 2 looks great to me with default settings (Though Post-Processing and Bloom do wonders for the atmosphere).

Update: Aaaaand it has completely stopped working. I can only get as far as the main menu now. New Game leads to a crash every single time. It's like the game is slowly degrading on me.

I'd like to note that I have very old ATI drivers. The problem is, I'm having trouble updating them. The Catalyst Install Manager does not show any drivers to update to, despite having downloaded the full 50mb package. It instead wants to just always reinstall itself for some dumb reason. I have a feeling a driver update may in fact solve my problem if the dumb thing would let me update them.

SubTonic on 1/8/2011 at 04:29

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Well, as far as updating drivers goes, I can't find a way to do it. Every single download link, even for the supposed "drivers only" package, forces me to use the Catalyst Install Manager, and that refuses to acknowledge that I have the drivers downloaded and ready to install. If I could somehow update my drivers without having to go through Catalyst, that would be great.