Macha on 15/8/2010 at 21:54
Hello,
Me and my friend were in Game today and I convinced him to purchase the new All-in-one Thief DVD. Unfortunately when we got back to his house and installed the first two I found both games pretty badly glitched. After fixing one problem I encountered another and so on. He is running a fairly mediocre Windows 7 machine. The strange thing about it is it has integrated graphics as opposed to a card.
I am sure you guys are sick of countless threads similar to this one but I was wondering if you could perhaps provide links to some add-ons that would make the graphics and game playable for my friend who has never experienced thief before. Unfortunately I am only used to running the Thief games on XP so I've been unable to help him.
I know there are texture packs out there but which ones are the best and which add ons conflict?
I know DDfix is something that is meant to fix the resolution for bigger monitors but I've never had to use it so if someone could also explain to me what that is I'd be rather grateful.
Brian The Dog on 16/8/2010 at 12:18
DDFix is a DirectX replacement patch that directly replaces the ddraw.dll in DirectX in the game. The Dark Engine used DirectX 7, some of which's procedures have been deprecated or modified in more recent graphics card drivers. In theory DirectX should be backwards-compatable, but in practice graphics card manufacturers tend to be lax about such things. DDFix provides a version of these procedures so that these modern cards can play the games.
Since it's the more modern graphics cards with dedicated GPUs that have had these DirectX calls modified, older cards or on-board graphics seems to not have these issues. In particular, the Intel integrated graphics seem fine with the Dark Engine.
One of the other problems with the Dark Engine is that multi-core CPUs were practically unheard of on gaming PCs, so no multi-core support was added. While that's not unusual even today, in practice the engine cannot cope with multi-core CPUs and so crashes after a few minutes. This is much easier to fix however, and DDFix does tell the Dark Engine to only use 1 CPU core, which solves the problem.
You can get DDFix (
http://www.filefront.com/16384349/ddfix-1.4.5-complete.zip/) here. Let me know if you want a hand setting it up, it should solve all the problems about getting Thief to run. Essentially you just run the DDFixGUI program. You can then add extra stuff like mouse-wheel support for Thief 1 and widescreen later, but it's more important just to get the thing to work :)
PS - DDFix lets you use "normal" 4:3 resolutions - I have it at 1280x1024, but you could also have 1600x1200, which is the limit of what most standard monitors support these days. You just set two numbers in two config files after you've installed DDFix.
Macha on 16/8/2010 at 16:26
Thanks for the help Brian, I think I'm going to be taking you up on that offer of help as I'm having the following trouble:
Okay so DDfix (gui version) is acting up on my computer. After double clicking the execute file from the thief folder I get a 'The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click okay to terminate the application.' Can someone please help asap as me and my friend planned on having a hazy thief playthrough tonight.
Brian The Dog on 16/8/2010 at 18:27
Sure, here's the manual approach to installing DDFix for Thief. For Thief 2, do exactly the same thing but put DDFix in Thief 2's directory, and do step (6) on THIEF2.EXE.
You will need two pieces of software - (
http://www.filefront.com/16384349/ddfix-1.4.5-complete.zip/) DDFix, and (
http://www.pspad.com/) PSPad. Then do the following.
1) If you've got any version of Thief installed, un-install it.
2) Install Thief, make sure it's not in the Program Files directory, otherwise UAC may complain.
3) Run Thief. You will get an error message, but this is important as it populates some lines in a config file you will edit later. Exit the game to the desktop.
4) Copy the DDFix files to the Thief directory.
5) Make a copy of your THIEF.EXE file for backup purposes.
6) Open PSPad, choose "Open in HEX Editor", and choose THIEF.EXE
7) Navigate to the first instance of the text "ddraw.dll", and change it to say "ddfix.dll". Do not change anything else! Save and close.
8) Go to "ddfix.ini" in the game directory, and make sure the following lines are this:
gWidth=1280
gHeight=1024
MultiCoreFix=1
VideoFix=1
9) Open "cam.cfg" in the game directory, and make sure the following line is correct:
game_screen_size 1280 1024
10) Run Thief, it should all work now
The numbers in (8) and (9) MUST match, and they are the resolution you are want to play it in - the ingame resolution has been disabled. This works for Thief 1, Gold and 2, just do it on all game directories
If you get stuck on any of these steps, then feel free to PM me or write a reply to this thread :thumb:
