Sheng-ji on 10/4/2009 at 15:10
Hi all, I recently stumbled across a thread over at something awful all about thief and it reignited my passion for one of the only computer games I have ever really enjoyed!
So I set about the mammoth task of getting it to work on my computer, a stock sony vaio laptop running vista ultimate. I follow the many many different guides out there finding the solution that worked for me, slowly but surely getting the game to a playable state.
Eventually I get the game working as it should with only one drawback, no video's, but no problem I thought - even though I loved them, they're all avaliable on youtube, I'll have them lined up and alt tab out to watch, bit of a phaff but the best I was prepared to do that day before getting stuck into a bit of burglary!
Fast forward a few weeks and I'm just starting the Caverns level, when, for no good reason I decide to have another tinker with the video's and bingo! I get them working. Now the only way to view them is to play the game in administrator mode, which brought two problems, 1. I could no longer set the affinity in task manager (I never did get the permanent fix working) but I solved that with a little program called process watch, which detects thief.exe and automatically sets the affinity for it.
My second problem is the reason I have started this thread....
When I run the program in admin mode, I have no saves... no bindings either. If I run it as normal, my saves are back, but obviously no video's! Aha, thinks I, they must be saved somewhere by profile, strange seeing as it used to use the saves directory in the install (from what I remember all those years ago), but nevermind, a quick search should find them and I can copy them into the admin profile!
I searched and found nothing. I even searched the registry as I found a few vague comments along those lines, still nothing. I went into the game in admin mode and saved a game in a slot I knew was empty, and sure enough that file was saved into the saves directory, just as I expected! Now when I go into the game in normal, non admin mode, that save is there as well as my old ones!!!
So does anyone know where the game is putting those saved files or a way to access them while running it as admin?
theBlackman on 11/4/2009 at 05:06
Vista does weird things with nearly all saves in all games, and especially with TDS.
It has its own special way to handle stuff. Try a global "Search this forum" for VISTA.
I seem to recall someone mentioning that they had located the "Saves" file, but as I don't and won't have VISTA, I payed no attention.
Here are some comments from others:
my savegames folder is in users\matt\appdata\roaming\microsoft\windows
c:\Users\matt\Documents\Thief - Deadly Shadows
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's what I did to get Thief - Deadly Shadows working correctly in Vista:
Hit Windows Symbol + R on keyboard to bring up the run dialog
type in: regedit
hit control + F to perform a search
search for: Ion Storm
expand the Thief - Deadly Shadows folder, right click SaveGamePath, and select Modify... option
select a location ( I created a folder in \users\<my account>\Saved Games )
game was released well before Vista, obviously, so the default save game path was pointing to a location you didn't have write access to, which was causing the problem
problem should be solved - was for me
Sheng-ji on 12/4/2009 at 20:19
Thankyou very much for your help,
I've found then, and just as I start the final mission, I'll have a fully functioning game woo! Any excuse to replay!!!
Basically, the game was trying to save to a folder it didn't have permission to, so instead of sending back an error message, windows created a file it calls virtualstore and dumps all that kind of thing in there. Within virtualstore is a whole directory structure, which I could save files into as if they were the real location, therefore the game wasn't any the wiser that it had been redirected to a different location!
Cutting the babble, for anyone with a similar issue, I found my saves at: C:\Users\Will Jones\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Thief Gold\SAVES
Obviously Will Jones is the name of my profile, substitute your own profile name in there!
If this even helps one taffer out there, my work is done!
