Hello there,

even though I own Thief 3 already I'm thinking about rebuying it on
gog.com since my Thief 3-version doesn't run that well on Windows 7(64x).

So can anybody tell me whether the gog-version runs better?

Thanks for helping! :)

The Collection version, Gamersgate and GOG all run perfectly fine for me on 64-bit.

You shouldn't have any problems.

Thanks for the answer!
Then I'm getting it right now - looking forward to visit the Cradle once more. :D

Good luck in the Cradle! Remember to bring some spare underwear.

If i remember correctly from what Ive read on some forum; both thief 3 and system shock 2 had some probs with dual and quad core processors. The steam release didnt work at all on multiple core systems since they didnt do anything about it.

My experience on a win 7 64 bit (stationary) and win vista 32 bit (laptop) system is that both games worked fine at the beginning but somehow the saves became corrupted after the first save. Either that or the games froze/couldnt quit properly. This includes the original and the steam version of thief 3 and the the original SS2.

The question is: how much and what did gog do to make it more stable on later platforms?

Personally, I will buy the gog releases if it turns out these games works great on win 7 (still waiting for SS2 guys *hint*).

The solution is to start the game, press ctrl-alt-del to bring up the Task Manager, then right-click the Thief 3 process and set the affinity to one core only (i.e. uncheck all but one box in the list). It's somewhat annoying because you have to do it every time you run the game, but it eliminates crashing due to incompatibility.

Ok thx. :)
I will try that.

You can also make a shortcut to the game that forces it to only use one CPU core.

K, but how do I set it to 1 core in the steam launch options? I followed ur advice and it seems to work fine. Thx!

Glad to hear it, have fun!

I have the steam version, a 64bit laptop, and with the fan patch (core affinity/widescreen support) it works great...

Are there any other benifits to buying hte gog version other than the obvious zero DRM?

Incase anyone's interested, if I remember right this will help getting Thief 3 Deadly Shadows working on newer systems.

First you need to update to v1.1.

Then you need the t3.exe from the Thief 3 Editor, it was obviously released long ago but shouldn't be to hard to find, unfortunately the editor download is pretty big (300+MB) and you only want that one file from it to replace the one in your Thief 3 game's system folder. They were also nice enough to remove the CD checks from the editor's t3.exe so don't use any other such files or it won't work.

After that it should be working but you may still have some problems especially if trying to play in widescreen (eg 1920x). If while trying to play in widescreen and you seem to get stuck in the menus (can't click some buttons etc) a widescreen fix could help.

I suggest you get the Widescreen fix from http://www.foxular.net/asdf/t3_widescreen.exe
And the FOV patch from http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/downloads/T3FovPatch.zip or http://mugon.org/widescreen/thief.html
Copy them to the game's system folder where t3.exe is and launch them from there.

There is another thing that can cause problems on Windows 7, thanks to a really stupid "feature". Windows will try and access the internet to get info on the game and if it can't or is blocked by a firewall you'll notice you CPU usage go up and the game won't start, checking Task Manager you'll see it's thanks to rundll32.exe.

If this is happens you need to do the following to get the game to launch (happens with other older games on Windows 7 also, this also works for them).

Try start the game until rundll32.exe starts abusing your CPU, once it's doing this try launch the game again, in this case t3.exe and end the task rundll32.exe before the game launches, but not to soon or you'll be back to square 1, if you don't manage to end rundll32.exe before the game starts and takes over the screen the game could be really slow because rundll32.exe is still abusing your CPU, so you could try alt tabbing out to ask manager and ending rundll32.exe.

I think that's all the problems I ran into, though it was some time ago so I may have missed one.

No idea about Steam, but for a general shortcut, you set the target to be

c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 c:\games\Thief3\t3.exe

where you modify the path to the thief game (and also to the cmd.exe if it is located in a different place, e.g. on x64 platforms) as required.

Steam will probably have somewhere in it's settings for a particular game to specify what the command-line call to execute the game should be, so you can modify it there. I hardly use Steam, so can't help much with it, sorry.

Edit - just as a flag to users, this won't work on XP or earlier, since "affinity" was added in Vista.

Hi, I'm the author of the Sneaky Upgrade patch mentioned here: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/thief_series/thief_iii_tips_tricks_fixes.

I'd suggest that you try that first instead of those older patches, which it was made to replace. It's much easier to install, and contains some extras.

It also fixes the multicore issue, at least for the vast majority of players.