-Hoping you guys can point to, or post here a tutorial on lock picking and safe cracking for SC: Double Agent on the PC. I use a keyboard and mouse. Reading my manual, there's just no precise description on performing the tasks. What I can tell it involves a comb of the w,a,s,d keys and spinning the mouse wheel. Try as I might, it just utterly fails my old brain on doing the tasks. At times, on safe cracking, I can get one of the lights to turn green, and I think that means one of the particular wheels/tumblers have ligned up proper; but then I can't figure the method to "move" to the next "tumbler" and get it to spin. Any movement of the mouse wheel after getting a green light, and what I presume is the aligned tumbler spins causing the green light to go out.
-Door lock picking , I fail miserably at that as well. Just can't figure out the keyboard/mouse control dynamics. Not near as intuitive as SC1 and SC3 Chaos Theory controls were.

- What happened with the Thief-esk "light gem" system? Gone forever in SC:DA? Any way to get the overlays enabled?

This is the Gamefly purchase version of the game.

Note: the only way I can get SC:DA to function with audio during game play is to install it on the OS partition. That was when I had booted to my WinXP. Had already tried installing it with Win8.1 to another, much larger partition and had the same no game play audio issue. The splash video's had audio just fine; just not during game play and gameplay cut scenes. Silly all that audio issue, my OS partitions are the smallest, as I intended those partitions to be only for their respective OS's and whatever neccessary files the OS's needed to function. I'll probably try that Steam official method of moving steam games out to custom locations/partitions; maybe that will work on SC:DA.

Note 2: The game play audio appears to be now working on my Win8.1Pro 64bit. I edited the Win8.1 registry to the WinXp game install location, and so far the in game audio is fine. I just now have to get a handle on the above mentioned lock picking and safe cracking dynamics.

jimb

I haven't played it in ages, but if its similar to Chaos Theory, I think you just fiddle around with each movement key until it starts to move a pin and once it does, keep holding that movement key.

I'll see if I can find anything else. I personally loathed the hacking in the game. I remember some real frustrating moments.

As I recall too, of all things, the original Xbox version of this game was the best. Less buggy, had a bit of a different intro mission and was one of the best looking and I think the last game made for that console. I bought it on pc through DirectToDrive but not sure if I can access it anymore. I'm tempted to get a Steam version when it goes on the cheap.

Well,
I was looking to deep into the lock picking. Just as you said its all really no different from Chaos Theory. I felt so silly when I realized my foolishness. True, the safe cracking does take careful mouse input, but it was my brain, or lack there of, that was making it hard.
jimb