two players only one quick save???

[leobean]

Any one know how to personalize quick save. My husband and i play the game and are at different points in the missions. If i hit quick save it wipes out his previous quick save. any ideas as to how 2 people can each play with their own quick saves??

[Ian Flaer]

I think you could do it by creating seperate identities in windows, you know so you have to log on with your own user name. that would make a different personal file. I'm not sure if this will even work but I figure what you want to do is to find a way that the game saves the files into different folders. one way to do this would be to rename folders before you play each time, but what a pain that would be. good luck with this and if you find an easy way to do it let me know so I can keep my daughter's saves sorted from my own. we've just been writing down the date and time of our save on a piece of paper.

P.S. Also I hear that repeatedly saving over the same save slot (like you do with quicksave) will cause the file to get corrupted after a while and the game will crash either durring load or shortly thereafter. fear the quicksave!

[Mr. Perfect]

Originally Posted by Ian Flaer

Also I hear that repeatedly saving over the same save slot (like you do with quicksave) will cause the file to get corrupted after a while and the game will crash either durring load or shortly thereafter. fear the quicksave!

Thsi is very true. We frequently get people asking why their save games are currupted. I'd say that the best way to protect your save game from each other and from Theif 3 itself is to switch to using the save slots. It's just a simple "ESC, save, ESC" deal.

[theBlackman]

Make your saves in a CREATE SAVE slot. WRITE down the DATE AND TIME AND LOCATION. The game has unlimited save space. You are limited only by the size of your HDD.

So have hubby make his saves, and you make yours. Use the CREATE SAVE for the last position you were in when you left the game. Make a note of it as above.

Then you can both use the QS in game and don't need to worry about whos save is what.

You both cn make as many saves with the CREATE SAVE as necessary, and as long as you write them down, you can have a list of a dozen or more from your period of play.

To get back to your game, from the title menu LOAD GAME. Then on the screen use the DOWN ARROW on the keyboard. This will scroll you through the saves one at a time. When you see the one you want, select it and continue your game. If you try to use the mouse on the bar at the side it is nearly impossible to control with accuracy, but the UP and DOWN arrows will scroll the SAVES, LOADS, MISSION OBJECTIVES etc. easily and painlessly.

[Quillan]

You'd have to install the game twice, under different login names (each with Administrator rights). That way the saves would be under the login names in the Documents and Settings folder, instead of the same folder, where it will be overwritten.

[theBlackman]

You can do this, but using the CREATE SAVES and logging the individual saves is easier, and no big hassle.

You can have 15 players using the same game if each makes saves with the CREATE SAVE function, and notates the place, date, and time of THIER particular save.

Then anyone of them can scroll the LOAD menu and pick any one of thier saves to play.

I have 300 meg of saved games (some 200 or more, with the notations of where each save is IN GAME) and can go back to the first day of play and pick a SAVE to replay, or to test a gameplay function.

[cliffmeister]

Originally Posted by Mr. Perfect

Thsi is very true. We frequently get people asking why their save games are currupted. I'd say that the best way to protect your save game from each other and from Theif 3 itself is to switch to using the save slots. It's just a simple "ESC, save, ESC" deal.

i never have problems with quiksaves

[Ian Flaer]

Originally Posted by cliffmeister

i never have problems with quiksaves

you're one of the lucky few then.

[Brother52]

Coming back to the original question, surely you just need to create two seperate user accounts on the PC, save games are stored in MY Documents somewhere and so should be seperate for each user.

[Peter Smith]

I was amazed to read this, so I decided to do some experiments, includng reinstalling the game under Administrator rather than my own administrative account. I did a deinstall between installs, so I did not test Quillan's theory. I'll leave that to you.

I found by experiment that no matter which admin user installs the game, the save games are located in the installer's My Documents folder. When another player logs in under a different user name, his saves are located in the original installer's My Documents folder, not his own My Documents folder. I could find no file anywhere, text or binary, that pointed to where the saves were located. So I searched the registry, and I found the following key:

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ion Storm\Thief - Deadly Shadows\SaveGamePath

The last token is the key itself, and it has a value (in my case) of

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\Thief - Deadly Shadows

An adventurous person could probably write a couple of regedit scripts to change the value of this key. This should allow one to go back and forth. It would be necessary to copy your basic user configuration to the alternative location before beginning this. Don't do it unless you are comfortable with editing the registry -- it can be very dangerous.

In my not-so-humble opinion, this is stupid programming on two counts: one is that admin privileges is needed to run the game; the second is this permanent save location. Bah. Oh well, it is a good game if you overlook this.

As far as theBlackman's suggestion of recording the dates on your saves, I think that would be quite inconvenient, although it is definitely possible. Another stupid programming thing is that the game does not allow you to name your saves, e.g., "username_save1". That would be a lot easier. It looks like our friends at Ion Storm never considered the fact that more than one user, even one without admin privileges, might want to run the game.

If I were doing this, I would attempt the registry script idea first. I would model it after a script I have that sets and resets coolbits. My second preference would be to try Quillan's suggestion of dual installations. However, it is not clear to me that this will work. It is possible that there is only one registry key as indicated above, and the second install would overwrite the registry key created by the first. That could also make the first installation an orphan with no way to deinstall it. I doubt that this would harm anything, though. If this happened, one could always just delete the files of the orphaned installation. Don't hold me responsible for this, but I would guess you have nothing to lose other than your time and some disk space to try it.

If anyone tries this, either the registry or the dual installation method, please post your results.

Good luck.

[Brother52]

Originally Posted by Peter Smith

... I found by experiment that no matter which admin user installs the game, the save games are located in the installer's My Documents folder. When another player logs in under a different user name, his saves are located in the original installer's My Documents folder, not his own My Documents folder. ...

That's appalling programming, the whole point of seperate My Documents folders is to allow this. T3 may as well store the save games in the T3 install directory. Something to fix in a patch, oh of course no more Ion Storm, <sigh>