I replayed Invisible War last year after finishing up Deus Ex HR, and yeah. The engine has me pretty weary to check out Thief 3, but some of the posts here and what I hear in general kind of restore my faith. Definitely sounds better than Invisible War, but it still really sucks they had to use that crappy engine. It had good stuff like the lighting and physics as some of you are saying, but man the tiny levels are such a bummer... I love huge seamless levels in older FPS's.

I'll definitely check it out. Probably going to take a break after Thief 2 though and give it sometime, I imagine unlike jumping from Thief 1 to 2, if I jumped into 3 right after it'd feel pretty awkward.

Hi guys, never really used the GoG.com Forums before, but thought that i would drop in and share my two-peneth over the subject of the Thief series of games. Firstly, let me wave a large bag of gold at the GoG.com team with the plea that they get and release thief Deadly Shadows for us, specifically getting the darn game to run on Windows 7!

Thief 3 is probably one of my favourite games of all time alongside Doom 3 and just like that game i can't get it to run under Windows 7. The situation is so frustrating i actually considered getting either a super-cheap PC to run XP Pro or actually Partictioning my Harddrive to run XP and thus Thief 3 and Doom 3.

The Gog.com team pull off minor miracles on a monthly basis, getting old games to work on modern PC's. If they can get T3 to work under Windows 7 it will genuinely be a First as NO-ONE can get the game to run properly. Even the guys at Sold-Out.co.uk refuse to support it.

So come on Gog.com wizards, crack the conundrum and release a Windows 7 compatible version of Thief 3! :)

Interestingly enough both my disc version and my Steam version of T3 never had a problem. One of those things I suppose. I have an i7-930, 4GB RAM and a GTX 460 running Windows 7 Home. My dad had a problem with his Steam copy at first, but he had one of the original series of quad cores. He now has a new i5 and it works without a problem.

What is the system you have?

Thief 3 does run on Windows 7 64-bit, but it does require a bit of tweaking. Namely, the affinities of the Thief 3 processes (both of them) must be set to one core only on multi-core processors, otherwise users will experience frequent crashes.

Thief 3 steam version works on my 64bit Windows 7 (home and ultimate) just fine... No tweaks needed... At least I personally never encountered 'frequent crashes'...

Although I do prefer getting widescreen patch into it...

Same, never had a crash, never needed to set affinities. I think the problem with T3 is that it is very system specific whether you will see problems with it or not. I know heaps of people have had these issues, but it is by no means universal.

I'd be very happy to buy Thief 3 from GOG ... provided that it will does not require an admin-level account to run. Thief 3 installed from my physical copy only runs if given admin rights.

This is a deal-breaker issue for me, as, being security-aware, I will NOT run a game as an admin. Also, if it requires admin-level rights, how can I let my son (who, logically, does not have admin-level access to my PC) play it?

No game should EVER require admin-level rights to run.

That's just wishful thinking. I have some games for which the save system doesn't work unless the game executable is run as admin, and more than that, because they are on my Steam account I therefore have to run the Steam client as administrator else the game executable can't see Steam.

Unfortunately, for old games, if they need admin rights then they need admin rights. It's a minor incompatibility issue as they were designed for old Windows OSes that didn't have UAC and DEP. Modern games should take into account Vista and Win7 security and run fine, though.

EDIT: Oh, and for reference, my Steam client and games are OUTSIDE of Program Files (x86) and still there are games that must be run as admin.

Can't you just set the game to run with admin rights even on a non-admin account? That won't solve your security concerns but it would let your son play it.

Unfortunately, the requirement for admin rights is more of a problem with Windows than with the games, I think, especially for older games. Games need to be specifically programmed with the new security features of Vista and Windows 7 in mind in order to run successfully without admin rights. Older games that were made before these OSes were released will often simply not function without admin rights, through no fault of the game developers.

As others mentioned, avoiding the Program Files directory when installing games will help minimize how often you need to run with admin rights.

No, it's not wishful thinking. Of the over a hundred games I've bought over the last decade, Thief 3 is the only one that has refused to run on an XP user-level account. Clearly, then, it's not impossible, or even particularly difficult, to do.

As far as Steam is concerned, I had no problems when I used to run Steam on a user-level account. Admittedly, this was about the time Half Life 2 appeared, so presumably we've had more time for lazy developers to release bad product.

"If they need Admin rights, they need Admin rights." The only old games I've had a problem with in this regard are, amazingly, those from GOG. Think Duke Nukem, Blood, etc. GOG's installer, for reasons unknown to me, requires admin-level rights to run (whereas the installers for Star Trek Online, Champions Online, EverQuest and others don't). A consequence of this is that all the config and save-game files are owned by the admin, and users can't edit them. The games themselves still run, though.

Games written for modern-multi-user OSs (into which class Thief 3, from 2004 falls), have no such excuse. They should not be accessing any files which require admin-level access, and they should be able to write to the appropriate users folders.
I'm running XP Home, and there is no such facility to pre-set admin-level rights when launching an application. Thankfully, Thief 3 is the only game I've found that mis-behaves this way, though I read mutterings on GOG's Chaser forum that that game might share the problem. I haven't tried to run it yet.

Oh, and I don't install my games in the Program Files directory anyway. They have their own drive. :)

Unfortunately, there is simply no way I'm going to be able to upgrade to Windows 7 any time soon.

Of course it's wishful thinking. Games so old that they were created before Vista and the security measures it introduced cannot be expected to have modifications made to them to ensure that they work fine without "Run as administrator" when used on Vista and 7 (and 8). Developers aren't going to continue working and patching their games forever more.

My recent example was when I bought the Lara Croft collection on Steam in the recent sale. Tomb Raider Anniversary and Legend must be run with the "Run as administrator" option because if this isn't done, although the game runs, any savegames will not load on subsequent runs. And to run them with the "Run as administrator" option you must then also run Steam with it too else otherwise the games do not see the Steam client and will not launch from it. Underworld is fine, however. In this case the cause seems to lie with the Legend engine (Annivesary uses a modified Legend engine) and Legend came out in 2006 before Vista was released later that year.

Thief 3 was released in 2004 (even older than my example) but what I can say for it is that I have a copy of Thief 3 on a Sold-Out re-release retail disc and I installed it and played it on Vista fine without having to use the "Run as administrator" option, so if GOG get it then I would expect it to run fine.

GOG sell a lot of old games, much older than Vista and 7, and GOG do not have access to source code so cannot alter the way in which the games themselves work. They provide their own installers and sometimes included tools to get them running (such as DOSBox).

Sounds like dferstat is actually running XP though. It's more reasonable to expect Thief 3 to run without an admin account on that. I also thought dferstat was talking about VIsta or 7 but apparently that isn't the case.

By the way, your problem with the savegames in the Tomb Raider games might be solved by installing to somewhere other than Program Files. This is a common fix for savegame issues with GOG releases... the Porgram Files folder has extra protections which causes the OS to move the savegames somewhere else which can mess stuff up. Unfortunately, since you're using Steam, this means installing Steam somewhere other than Program Files too. But I hear that moving one's Steam folder is actually not that hard. Just in case you're interested.

Yeah, dferstat did say they were using XP but not moving to Win7, so it isn't clear whether the comment was in regards to needing admin on their current XP system or the problem with it with Win7. Regardless though, my post was just in relation to the whole "No game should ever require admin-level rights" which is something that can never be guaranteed what with how games aren't supported forever on all future OSes.

As for my Tomb Raider Legend issue, as I've said, I don't use Program Files for any games, Steam is installed in C:\Games\. But I've finished Legend and Anniversary now, I'm playing Underworld at the moment.

Blah, sorry. I saw the earlier comment about running Steam from C:\Games but didn't realize that was you. Because I wasn't paying attention.

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129139

For people with lockups in Thief 3 in vista and win 7. YOu might try the patch offered in this thread.