Has anyone else tried running Thief (or Thief II and System Shock 2, for that matter) with this year's newest release of Wine? All games crash on startup, seemingly because the new version of Wine has broken video playback in these games. However, while renaming the movies folder allows you to get to the menu, the games sometimes crashes upon loading a level, so I really am unsure what exactly is causing the problem here.

I've tried reporting the bug on the Wine database, but the site appears to be having some technical difficulties...I'll try doing so again in the future. In the meantime, though, it'd be nice if someone else had found a workaround...or at least could have pinpointed what exactly got broken between updates.

I just tried with Thief and Wine 10.3, and it launched OK. I'm using Gentoo, so my Wine may be configured differently from vanilla, but it seems like it can work at least.

Do the cutscenes work regularly, without causing any crashes? I can't check for myself at the moment, as I've resorted to just downgrading to the older Wine 8.0 from my distro's repositories. The issues I've experienced happened on both Wine 10.0 and 10.1, so it's possible that the developers have ironed out the problem in the meantime.

Sorry, misread the post and assumed it to be a different problem. What I posted was related to the cutscenes not working but not the crashes.

The cutscenes for me work by default on wine 10.5, but stop working after installing TFix. I used to fix this by installing icodecs with winetricks, however that no longer works on WOW64 wine prefixes. I have been able to fix the cutscenes by replacing the default lgvid.dll in the thief install directory with a static linked version from web.archive.org/web/20140715185114/zandysoft.com/lgvid.dll. Hopefully that works for you.

I've tried running all Dark engine games on Ubuntu 24.04 (the same behavior happens on Debian) with Wine 10.7 from the official WineHQ repo and the situation seems to have even gotten worse - now the games just crash on startup even if I remove the cutscenes folder. It's interesting how you seem to be able to run it just fine on Wine 10. Could it be something related to my distro?

I can't test it right now and haven't researched the issue either, but just in case, have you tried:
* to install and run it in a new, clean, Wine prefix?
* to install and run it in a 32-bit Wine prefix (in case the GOG installer and executable supports it)?
* to change the "Windows Version" settings in `winecfg` to an earlier version?
* to pre-install DirectX 9c with `winetricks d3dx9` before installing the game?
* to override `ir41_32.dll` and `ir50_32.dll` as suggested in the WineHQ AppDB entry?

I would try these in order, as the last suggestions are less likely to make a significant difference, but they're worth trying if you haven't yet and the output/logs might give you hints of what might be causing problems.

Hi, thanks for your advice. I've finally been able to solve the problem, somehow. I think I get what caused the problem, even though I still don't get why the problem itself appeared to begin with.

For future reference, here's what I did.

I created a clean 64-bit Wine prefix and installed the games anew. I installed the statically linked lgvid.dll library. When I started up the game, I got the crash again. I checked the log file - it turned out that the game failed to load the intro video, hence the crash. What's interesting is that the path to the intro movie was wrong: it was looking for it at "C:\Games\Thief\MOVIES\INTR^V". No wonder it was failing to find it!

^V is seemingly the escape sequence for vertical tab. How it got there, I don't know. I never got this problem in previous versions of Wine. Thankfully, the fix is as easy as it gets - move the INTRO.AVI file elsewhere, start up the game once, then move the intro file back. Interestingly enough, this problem doesn't happen with any other movie file.

The same problem happened with Thief 2 and System Shock 2 and of course, the same fix applied.

I spoke too soon - I keep getting other problems. I really feel like some kind of regression must have happened in Wine - I never got these kinds of issues before. What I'm currently experiencing is some pretty noticeable input delay (so, for instance, I could be pressing the movement forward key, with the movement starting some moments after, or stopping pressing that key, with my character not halting straight away), again only on Dark engine games, and of course, the crashing issues yet again, only this time on some FMs I've installed. At least I've got the base games to work smoothly.

I might add that I'm running the game from an external flash drive. I can get the game to load a mission just fine in there, but if I copy the game folder to the internal storage, I magically get a crash while loading a mission.

The issues also happen on a 32-bit Wine prefix.

I haven't been this perplexed in a while...it would probably help to make a report on the Wine application database.

I'm glad you managed to make a a little bit of progress.
I think the control character in the file name might just be a log artifact, otherwise it'd be quite odd indeed.

For issues like the input lag or stuttering, PCGamingWiki suggests several fixes you might try out if you haven't already.
It also mentions that the GOG release ships with an outdated lite version of TFix by the way, so you it could be quite valuable to install the latest (maybe full) version too before investigating Wine any further.

That being said, you might want to try reinstalling wine and the games in a clean environment, like a container or a VM.
If you encounter the same issues, you can then experiment with different Wine versions to identify whether it's actual Wine regressions.
Installing in a Windows VM might also help identify potential issues with the GOG release, but that's quite cumbersome if you don't have one at hand ready to test.

I understand you're more looking for specific help from people who've run the game successfully under Wine; it's just how I would go troubleshooting it myself.
Hopefully it can give you a few more ideas of things to try out.
Good luck!

Hi there, I appreciate your help! About this...perhaps you're right, but there's a chance this might be an indicator of the actual issue. After all, I've been encountering this issue with other kinds of files as well, such as squirrel scripts not loading in a FM that had no movie files at all.

As an example, when loading a FM on Wine 9, the log correctly reports
: Loaded script module "squirrel.osm"
whereas on Wine 10, the file name ends abruptly (and the game crashes):
: Loaded script module "squ^W" I've tried patching the game to the latest TFix, unfortunately with no improvement. I haven't gone down the VM path, but I've reinstalled Wine and for that matter also the system (Debian 12 and Ubuntu 24.10). Still no improvement. Running the same installation of the game on Windows 11 on a similarly specced computer gave me no issues, so it's clearly not the game files that are at fault. Yeah, all in all, I'm convinced it's a regression - I've just reinstalled the version of Wine that's included in my distro's repos (Wine 9) and I'm not encountering any of the issues that happen with Wine 10. All movies play fine without the need to tweak any files, all FMs load, mouse and keyboard input are the way they should be.

Of course, relying on an old version of Wine is not a real solution. The game is supposed to work fine on the latest version, especially given that's it's always run fine before.

I've noticed that Steam Proton has just recently started being updated to Wine 10 - given that nowadays most people seemingly use Proton rather than Wine itself, I'll be waiting to see if other people will be reporting issues similar to mine. It would sure be strange if I were the only one experiencing these problems...

Well then, it sounds like a definite regression (or several of them).
I'd suggest testing with the latest Wine 10.8, just to be sure it hasn't been fixed in the mean time, and filing an issue; it's likely to be something worth checking and fixing before the stable release.
That's quite some additional work on itself though, just to gather the necessary information, report and then follow up…

It's still in beta though, so it might be a while before anyone gets around to trying this particular game on it.
There doesn't seem to be any Proton 10 report on protondb yet.

Well, thanks to your extensive testing we now know we should avoid Wine 10 to play this game, at least for the moment.
Thanks ;)

I've finally decided to write a bug report on Wine's bugzilla. As I suspected, I'm not the only one experiencing the crashes - another user has reported them, and has already identified a couple possible responsible commits starting from Wine 10 rc1. If anyone else is interested, the bug report is at the following link: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58363

Well, how nice. The problem has been quickly solved and included in Wine 10.11. I should have made this bug report way earlier.