Thief has constant light_bright. Need help!

karmaKGB on 15/10/2006 at 04:57

Hi. Thief and Thief II are my favorite games of all time. I had an idea to go back and play through them again today. My computer, however, did not agree. When I loaded the first mission in Thief II I was greeted with the unholy sight of every single pixel of the landscape and buildings awash in brightness while the bushes and characters were almost entirely black. Oh no! Oh yes.

The last time I'd fired up the ol' Thief series it was to fix the whole missing stars issue with Thief II (it looks so much better with stars!). That involved changing all the missions through Dromed. However, it worked perfectly fine then. So something has changed between then and now that did not involve any further changes to Thief itself. This affects not only Thief II but also Thief Gold and all the FMs.

Since discovering this problem I have tried loading missions through Dromed, using the light_bright command, reinstalling Thief II, loading missions through Darkloader and rolling back my Nvidia drivers from 91.47 to 81.98. None of those changes have made a bit of difference. Given all of that, I don't think that this has anything to do with the games themselves. I've read what information I could in some old threads regarding this problem but couldn't find any specifics regarding solutions. Any suggestions? Has anyone actually fixed this problem on their system? Do I need to roll back my drivers even farther or is this not a driver issue?

Any and all help will be much appreciated. Man, I really want to play now.

Elentari on 15/10/2006 at 05:23

I'm going to state the obvious - as its really the only thing I have to suggest. You *did* check the gamma in game, right? :)

karmaKGB on 15/10/2006 at 06:05

Yes. I wish it were that obvious. Nice try, though! :D

cradle_curdled on 15/10/2006 at 13:57

A good place to start is to install on another system, so you can determine whether it's a graphics card, DirectX, or other issue.

karmaKGB on 15/10/2006 at 15:02

I've installed onto two other systems. One is an laptop with XP and a Radeon Mobility card and the other is an old Dell with Windows ME. Thief II worked fine on both of them. However, I don't think that the problem is related to a graphics card per se, since the games worked fine on my computer six months ago. Simliarly, I was using the same version of DirectX then. I suppose I'll go try and determine which drivers I was using then.