I've just bought Thief: The Dark Project, installed it, launched it, and set my video resolution and that all worked just great. It had my widescreen resolution of 1680x1050.

But when I started looking around at the installed files and saw a file named "!NewDark_note.txt", and I got a little worried. It reads:

"If you prefer to play original version over the New Dark patch, copy files from "BACKUP" to main folder and start the game with Thief.exe"

This was frustrating to me, because when I buy an old classic game, I want to play that old classic game exactly as it was, back then. I don't want replaced art, like models and textures (I can't believe this is even an option people consider). I don't want a new engine, I want the original game engine. I want the unadulterated working version of the game.

I do expect obvious, purely technical fixes, like:

- Installs on my modern OS and works without crashing all the time.
- Supports my screen resolution so the game is not letter-boxed, or worse, stretched disproportionately.

Other than that, I wouldn't want anything else.

Although I've known about GOG for some time now, I'm a new GOG user, and I really want to support it, especially over DRM services like Steam.

I feel that GOG should really release the classic, old games as vanilla as possible. And it's really annoying that I feel I have to read tons of forum posts and such just to try ascertain what experience I'm getting. I think this is a failure on GOG's part, and it should really be communicated much clearer than a scrappy readme text file, that I might not see.

So my questions are this:

- What exactly IS the default installed version of Thief from GOG's give you?
- If I copy files from "backup" folder, do I copy from "ddfix" or "no_ddfix"? And does that give me what I outlined above, a vanilla experience.

Please can someone make this clear for me.

I just want.

- The original Thief that...
- Installs on my modern OS and works without crashing all the time.
- Supports my screen resolution so the game is not letter-boxed, or worse, stretched disproportionately.

How can I get that?

your problem is that what you want it impossible. you either get stability, bugfixes and modern resolutions, OR the original, unmodified Thief. like it or not, when a game gets fixed up to work on modern hardware and software, small differences cannot be avoided. do note that these differences are very tiny, and the GOG build certainly does not contain any updated models or textures. your experience will be very, very close to the original.

but if you want a perfect, 1:1 original experience, and won't accept anything below 100%, then it's time to head to ebay and build a retro pc with pentium3, voodoo3 and win98.

anyway, no_ddfix is the original exe, ddfix is the the same exe with the original hack that increased compatibility with modern pcs (but is now deprecated and not updated for a few years, works on some pcs, but not on others). the current GOG build will get you the original game with all the original resources and assets, but running on the NewDark engine, which provides compatibility, stability, modern resolutions and controls, bugfixes and more (the list is huge, read the docs if you want). some basic fixes were applied to the levels as well to make sure everything works as smoothly as possible under the new engine.

no idea how anyone would NOT want this, but to each his own - that's why the older executables are still provided. but good luck trying to get them working - you are going to need (a lot of) it.

For sure, if a new, modified engine is necessary to get the thing to work, that's one thing. But I didn't know whether that was/is the case. If I could get the old engine running, but without things like content changes etc..., which you say the GOG version doesn't have, I'd prefer that. But that's not very well communicated when you buy the game. Which is one of my main contentions. You read forum posts, and see stuff about textures and models from Thief 2, pathfinding changes, and you start to get a little concerned and mixed up. So there's no need to be hostile, when the above hasn't been outlined clearly.

You said, "anyway, no_ddfix is the original exe, ddfix is the the same exe with the original hack that increased compatibility with modern pcs (but is now deprecated and not updated for a few years, works on some pcs, but not on others)"

Does that mean if I run either ddfix, or no_ddfix, it will run in the original engine? Or either way, whether I copy files from backup or not, it will always be running in the NewDark engine?

Thanks for your time.

Downloaded the game again by chance, and the files have changed! Much simpler now. Thanks!