jesper on 9/11/2006 at 16:00
All transgaming.com / Cedega users:
I have an ongoing vote on transgaming.org to get thief 1 and 2 better supported on Cedega. I need 5 more votes. Please use your vote and vote on this! Also spread the word to other cedega users whom you think might be interested in getting thief to be better supported.
Hopefully we will sometime soon be able to play thief as good as on windows with cedega :D
Thank you.
Jesper
Naked on 9/11/2006 at 17:09
Thief I and II were designed on primitive Windows OS's (Windows 95 to 2000 I believe). Therefore, I am lead to believe the game would not so easily be made compatible with Linux. I could be wrong, but this just comes to me as a given.
Istvan Varga on 9/11/2006 at 18:55
Actually, both Thief I and II already do run under WINE, although with a few minor issues (e.g. movies do not work). On the other hand, the last time I tried, TDS did not work at all. I do not use Cedega, so I probably will not vote on their forum, but reporting any problems to the WINE developers may also be a good idea - the bugs are more likely to be fixed if they actually know about them.
An open source implementation of the Dark Engine is also being worked on by some people, but it is only in early stages of development at this time, and it is not sure if it will ever be completed.
OrbWeaver on 9/11/2006 at 19:28
Quote Posted by Naked
Thief I and II were designed on primitive Windows OS's (Windows 95 to 2000 I believe). Therefore, I am lead to believe the game would not so easily be made compatible with Linux. I could be wrong, but this just comes to me as a given.
It is generally far easier to add compatibility for older games and products, as they do not depend on new, advanced features which haven't been ported yet.
Furthermore, older games are likely to be less graphics intensive, meaning that the inevitable performance impact of compatibility layers has less of an effect.
Huckeye on 10/11/2006 at 19:53
Not to be a party pooper, but...
I voted on better Thief support every month for 5 months in a row when I was a member. The most I ever got was one or two votes and NO Cedega improvements for it. I let my subscription go as it seemed they only wanted to get the greatest flavor halfway working and then move onto something else.
I'm not trying to discourage you, I think you should keep it up.
Just saying that Cedega might not be receptive. (I hope I'm wrong).
Kerrle on 11/11/2006 at 09:36
Cedega isn't your best bet for long term compatibility. They really don't listen to the votes much at all, and they don't share their changes back to mainstream Wine anyway.
There's an ongoing rewrite of D3D going on right now in the official wine. Once that's done, a no-cd patch should be all you need - Thief 2 at least has run well on older versions of Wine, and should run well in the future. Even the no-cd problem is temporary; there are already patches that make it unnecessary.
At the moment, the D3D rewrite is causing some problems with quite a few older apps that used to work, so I'm not 100% that Thief is working right now. This is temporary, though, and when I tried it about a month ago, the only major problem I had was that the mouse cursor was visible in the center of the game window.
Istvan Varga on 11/11/2006 at 11:41
I found that Thief I and II do not work with WINE versions 0.9.20 to 0.9.22, however, the problem - which is getting only a black screen in game mode that is not fixed by 'safe_texture_manager' - seems to have gone in 0.9.23 so the games are playable again. I will try 0.9.24 soon to see if that introduced any bugs, or if it works better. By the way, if you use the binary nvidia drivers, some recent versions may not work very well with WINE: I currently have 1.0.9626 (x86_64), and it does not allow running in fullscreen mode. On the other hand, the driver I previously used (1.0.8762, if I recall correctly) had display corruption issues: the light maps in Thief II were messed up. Perhaps I should try 1.0.8776 or the just released 1.0.9629, maybe one of those will work better. One annoying problem that exists in all versions of WINE is that the X mouse cursor is visible while playing the game - the only way I could fix this was by creating a simple utility that makes the cursor invisible.
sparhawk on 11/11/2006 at 12:47
I was also not so impressed with Cedega and let my subscription go. Last time I tried Thief with Wine though it was was working a bit, but unfortunately all the kyepresses were received in a shell window instead of the Thief app, so I could only use the mouse, which allows you not really to play much.
Istvan Varga on 11/11/2006 at 22:00
I have done a quick test of Thief II now with wine 0.9.24 and nvidia drivers 1.0.9629, and it seems to work OK so far, other than the usual minor problems that I always encountered with any wine version (e.g. no movies, no fog, annoying X mouse cursor that needs to be disabled manually, etc.). The lightmap corruption, and crash in fullscreen mode is fixed by the new video drivers. Gamma correction also works, unlike in some earlier versions of wine.
Volca on 12/11/2006 at 17:05
Hi. I've tested both Thief 1/2 on wine 0.9.25 with nvidia 1.0.8762-r1.
Both start OK, with some sound buffering problems, but the keyboard controls are not working. I think further versions will fix this.
Otherwise, the same as usual - Mouse cursor / no movies.
Runs fullscreen (didn't before for me).
