Portable Thief
I
got the idea one day that I'd like to be able to make Thief a
portable game; meaning that I'd have it on my flash drive and could
take it with me and play it on any computer that I might be in front
of. So after installing, upgrading & patching both Thief Gold
& Thief II, I took a 4GB flash drive, Created a "Thief"
directory on its root and then copied the installed "ThiefG" and
"Thief2" directories to the flash drive.
Now
you have to worry about the drive letter assigned to the flash drive.
Plugging the drive into different computers means you will most likely
get a different drive letter assigned for each computer you use. Since
the .cfg files point to a specific drive letter, you need to modify it
to work with any drive letter. At first I wrote a VBScript program to
figure out which drive letter the flash drive was assigned and then
modify the install.cfg files for the Thief Gold & Thief II.
Turns
out, you can modify the file to use whatever path it happens to be in.
Just use the "dot" path notations. A single dot means use the current
directory. A double dot means use the parent directory. So the config
files now look like this:
install_path .\
language
english
resname_base .\RES+.\RES
load_path .\+.\
script_module_path
.\+.\
movie_path .\MOVIES+.\MOVIES
I
replaced the path that Thief was installed in (K:\Thief\ThiefG) with
the single dot. This allows Thief to know where it's files are no
matter what drive letter is assigned. This works for both Thief Gold
& Thief II. For Thief Gold, you edit the "install.cfg" file and
replace its contents with the properties above. For Thief II, you edit
both the install.cfg and darkinst.cfg files the same way. All three
.cfg files (1 in Thief Gold and 2 in Thief II) are identical.
DarkLoader
is also pretty easy to make portable. You install DarkLoader on the
flash drive and create the FM Directories on the flash drive as well.
Configure your DarkLoader to point to the Thief Gold & Thief II
executables. Then configure the Fan Mission directories in DarkLoader.
After you get DarkLoader all configured, edit the DarkLoader.ini file
to use the dot path notations. You'll have to use the double dot
notation for this. Here is my directory structure on the flash drive:
<DriveLetter>:\Thief\
|_____ThiefG
|_____Thief2
|_____DarkLoader
|_____ThiefGFMs
|_____Thief2FMs
So
the DarkLoader.ini file needs to be modified to point to the FM
directories. The modified lines in my DarkLoader.ini file look like
this:
thief1dir=..\ThiefG
thief2dir=..\Thief2
[mission
directories]
..\Thief2FMs=1
..\ThiefGFMs=1
As
for GarrettLoader, It's hard to make it portable because it uses
ActiveX objects that must be registered on each PC that it's used on.
Since the point of being portable is to not modify the registry or any
other settings on the host PC, registering the ActiveX objects would
defeat the whole idea of portable. So I recommend only using DarkLoader
for the flash drive installation of Thief.
Well,
that's it.
Other than to say that Thief II has worked on every computer i've tried
it on. Thief Gold works on some, but not others. It works on all my
home computers which have various versions of Windows XP with SP2. But
when I tried it at work, I can go through the menu and see the intro
video, but then it's just a black screen and I have to stop it from the
task manager. I haven't found a solution yet and I've scoured the net.
I've found all kinds of people with the same problem, but nobody with a
working fix. If anyone knows how to fix this problem, let me know!
You
can email me at: tolsen64 (*AT*) hotmail (*DOT*) com.
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