shadow_ibix on 13/2/2010 at 22:40

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So bought a new graphics card and needed a fresh installation of Thief 1 The Dark Project, from its CD on my XP machine, now with ATI radeon HD4870, Catalyst 9.9 drivers. Since it worked (eventually :bored:), I am noting the order of steps here.

1. install from the CD.
2. install the 1.33 patch.
3. Used nocd on thief.exe to protect that CD. (optional but for widescreen patch later on). This did not impact the crashes.
4. Go to the 'properties' of thief.exe and enable 'compatibility mode' as 'windows 2000'. The game should start at this point (you can also try at earlier steps), you can go to the options, set the video resolution for example, then try to start and see it crash. Do this so it generates the 'cam.cfg' file (that ddfix needs to install).
5. used imagecfg to set processor affinity: imagecfg -a 0x1 thief.exe
6. installed ddfix (1.3.11) ran ddfixgui and modified thief.exe for ddfix. (installed ddfix 1.4.4 dll as well).
7. installed the widescreen patch into thief directory, ran the darkwidescreen.bat file, let it patch the thief.exe as well. At this point things sorta worked except for some occasionally messed up textures (freaky colors, like in the menus, save/load menus or in readables).
8. installed orgys textures (texturepatchhw.zip).
9. let darkloader optimise the install (click the setup button in darkloader and then OK to close the setup dialog and it'll do it if necessary). This fixed freaky colors.
10. copied convict.osm script file that came with darkloader in ThiefScripts.zip into thief directory.

At the end of all this, T1 works, in high resolution, with antialiasing override at x4 in the catalyst control center panel. The in game video works as well, also sound works. The only issue is that it crashes right after start 4 times out of 5 (you see the main menu and hear a first sound and it crashes), but when it does work, it works well, and for hours. (but I still save before opening readables).

I have no clue if fog is working.

In the Thief options, I enabled 'high detail' for characters in the video tab, and changed the controls considerably, to fit with Thief2 and The Dark Mod, i.e. w,s to move front back, a,d to slide leftright, ctrl to slow down, x to crough, q,e,f, to lean and [,] and ;,' keys to browse items and weapons. Used r to run forwards (but now I cannot drop garbage items I picked up, is there a key for that in Thief1? you can throw them with mouse1)

After these 10 very easy steps, you too can play mods such as 'The Dark Secret'. :cool:

shadow_ibix on 14/2/2010 at 11:55

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Thanks theBlackman, I changed that, its nice to quietly dispose of items :)

The crash at startup seems to be gone by adding these lines to dark.cfg (and an empty line at the end of the file):

It still crashes occasionally on start, but it seems to happen much less.

To fixup a gambling table that is invisible and an archer guard the is squashed into a midget, install the Thief Gold assets for FMs (its a legal subset that is not the complete thief gold but makes fanmissions work): (http://www.thief-thecircle.com/download.asp?fid=589)

Orgys faq said to let darkloader optimise the install again if guards are squashed, but that was already done, it was the TG assets.