Windows 10 has broken Thief Gold for me.

Ghostly on 17/11/2019 at 10:42

Call me crazy but I still maintain a windows 98 machine from Dell upstairs and as I have played Thief Gold to death hundred times in expert mode and with various personal goals to make it harder like ghosting rules for instance.

Only thing normal in your video is that they really can't notice you if you remain crouched with 0% visibility for most of the time like that in Thief 1, unless there is flickering light nearby that pulses and disrupts your visibility slightly but that's not the case as seen with your video, however I do easily get caught if I were to bracen your AI front view in partial visibility like that but that's on my windows 98 machine, but I would agree that it could have gone slightly bugged, knowing just how old the game is.

Meowdori on 17/11/2019 at 10:54

Yeah, could be just a single, isolated case of game corrupting itself and glitching, so first of all try to replicate this several times. If it persists, then you indeed have a problem, to which the 2 most obvious solutions would be to either play inside a VM or on a real hardware than can run older version of MS Windows.

EDIT: Also this is kinda obvious check, but if you're playing on NewDark engine, have you edited any config files? NewDark introduced some user-changeable variables pertaning to AIs behaviour, accessible via cam_ext.cfg, so make sure it's untouched.

Esme on 18/11/2019 at 14:07

I've had alerted AI bumping into me when crouched in dark areas before, usually in FM's though, but it does happen

Yandros on 18/11/2019 at 19:32

It's a config setting that authors can set in their FMs, but it is used very rarely. It was disabled by LGS in the OMs, probably for a good reason.

Lord Soth on 20/11/2019 at 17:07

Just pointless windows 10 bashing for no good reason and a wast of time being post on here in the first place. Had win 7 for ages and it was good, windows 10 is just fine to.

Meowdori on 20/11/2019 at 19:02

We're not going on about whether Windows X is better than Windows Y here, but merely trying to determine if the bugs actually occur. The OS is the hypothetical root cause here, and might very well be true.

Galaer on 20/11/2019 at 21:41

Heh, I replayed Tower Mages to recreate situations from video and enemies reacted to me identically. So yeah, that's normal. Sometimes enemies can't see you even if you are very close in front of them. But sometimes they can spot you from far away. It's based on their sensitivity. It's more visible in some harder FMs. Also if you would stood up on fire mage path, he would notice you and attack you. Even though I also have Windows 10 I don't think anything is broken. I think the only difference could be between Olddark and Newdark versions.

howeird on 21/11/2019 at 01:09

If you have a disk copy of Thief you could put it on windows 95. Just download Virtual Box - I believe it has CD disk support now. And, Microsoft put Windows 95 on github. You could go real old school. If Ubuntu still had a phone distro you could prolly play Thief on your phone.

Sulphur on 21/11/2019 at 06:19

Quote Posted by Meowdori

That is not a completely baseless assumption. Most programs call operating system's API functions to perform many operations. It's very unlikely that the AI code does rely on some API function that behaves differently in win10, but in some edge case that could possibly be true.

If anything, you might want to do a comparison inside a VM running Windows XP, for example (and maybe keep playing there, if it turns out that it works as intended).

If game logic were indeed dependent upon OS API calls, then a lot of games would break at random based on the version of the OS they're running on. However, as most people are sane, and there is no sane reason for AI routines to be coded to depend upon a specific OS API, if you've got it up and running without any other problems, you can safely assume the game is working as intended.

Unna Oertdottir on 21/11/2019 at 06:59

@howeird: No need to install an old OS for OldDark. Just assign a single CPU core to the game exe and it will work. I do that all the time for testing in OldDark.