Thief 2 Crashes at start of mission; all fixes tried, DDfix installed etc.

Tainted on 28/4/2010 at 23:48

I've recently dusted off my old games for another run.

I installed System Shock 2, Thief Gold and Thief 2. Thus far, Thief Gold and Shock have run fine after installing DDfix.

However, thief 2 will not work under any circumstances. The problem is always the same: I have set the game to run with 1 processor, I used the ddfix gui to patch the game and it always crashes the instant level 1 finishes loading. There is no error message to speak of, it just freezes. I have also tried the safe_texture_manager option, which allowed Thief 2 to work in the past, but this time no dice.

I am using Xp SP3 with Nvidia Geforce GTS 250.

I also tried the Tafferpatch, but this didn't help either.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Brian The Dog on 29/4/2010 at 10:34

You could use a hex-editor to see if the GUI version of ddfix worked properly. If not, you can apply the patch manually - there should be instructions in the ddfix download telling you how to do this.

Tainted on 29/4/2010 at 17:33

No joy I'm afraid :(

I have no idea what could be the problem. Its set to single-core, ddfix is installed.

I'm going to try using the 1.18 patch to see if this is because my version isn't patched up. If this doesn't fix it, I'm out of ideas :erm:

edit: no luck there, its already patched

Tainted on 29/4/2010 at 18:18

Okay, this is really fucking weird, I just got it to work - by installing it on a different drive :erm:

I originally had it installed on my 2TB SATA system drive (C:\Program Files\Thief 2)

This did not work at all - nothing fixed it.

So I remembered back when I last tried this, I tried installing it on a different drive, which I did originally by accident since I wasn't paying attention during an install - and suddenly it started working.

My current install is on a 500GB SATA drive. I used the processor.bat trick to get it to run on one processor, used the safe_texture_manager option in install.cfg and away it goes - runs, loads and plays.

I haven't gotten beyond successfully loading the very first mission, so I'm going to backup, install all the patches and fixes etc then try going through it.

Has anyone else had problems running a Dark Engine game thatw as solved by installing it on a different drive?

Yandros on 29/4/2010 at 22:58

That is strange. Some wild guesses, both of which are wrong I'm sure, it could be that 2TB is somehow causing a crash due to the size (100MB was a big drive in 2000) whereas 500MB is under some threshold, or that this could be a FAT32 vs NTFS issue and T2 doesn't like one or the other. I've never tried installing Thief on a FAT32 drive as far as I know - drives in both my current machines are NTFS and work fine.

Tainted on 29/4/2010 at 23:30

Well the drive its working on is NTFS.

Maybe it is the size: I think this was the same drive I installed it last time, but I can't be sure.

It just seems like such a random reason to not work, but then, I can now start playing an iron man session starting from thief 1 to celebrate my first few days off of work for ages :cheeky:

Bjossi on 4/5/2010 at 11:29

Maybe it is a permissions issue? Win7 & Vista are more strict in this regard but it does happen in XP too I believe. At the point of the crash the game might be attempting to make an auto-save but fails for some reason.

SiO2 on 4/5/2010 at 20:25

Quote Posted by Tainted

I originally had it installed on my 2TB SATA system drive (C:\Program Files\Thief 2)

:nono: Do NOT install Thief stuff in "Program Files" - this is a protected folder since the days of Vista and will just give you grief. You can mess around with Admin rights and stuff but its safest just not to do it. Use something like "c:\games\thief2".

It worked, I assume, because the other folder you installed to on the other drive was not a system protected folder.

Brian The Dog on 5/5/2010 at 20:39

Yep, this would also screw up DarkLoader copying Fan Mission files around. If you're thinking of doing ANY modification of the game files at all, do not install in Program Files. Just to be safe, I install all games in C:\Games

Nameless Voice on 8/5/2010 at 20:49

He clearly stated that he was using XP in the first post. :p

You still shouldn't install it to "Program Files", but only because it's messy, not because it won't work there in XP.