[Meanman]

I just recently downloaded SCP and the graphics look great! My problem is that the text in the mission briefings is all scrambled. Then once the mission starts the text is scrambled there too. I'm sure that it is just some stupid mistake that I made, but I would appreciate any help you guys can give.

[karajorma]

Can you post a picture? (Use the Printscreen key in-game and you'll find the shot in your screenshots folder).

[Meanman]

Here is what I got:



and this:




The strange thing is that I played one mission before this and the text was fine on that one.

[karajorma]

I suspect you have an older version downloaded since that problem appeared and then disappeared about a year ago.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,42854.0.html

As far as I know that installer should upgrade your version to a newer one that will look a whole lot better as well as fixing your problem. You won't need retail FS2 of course but you may need to check/upgrade other things.

[Meanman]

That's where I originally downloaded it. I tried running the installer again, and it said that everything was up to date. I have fs2 open 3.6.9 and Launcher version 5.5a. I'm pretty sure that is the most recent.

[Turey]

Here is what I got:

The strange thing is that I played one mission before this and the text was fine on that one.

I can't actually see the pictures (stupid filter!), but from your description of the problem, it sounds a lot like the one I sometimes get when I use alt-tab a lot. Simply restarting FreeSpace fixes it for me.

[Meanman]

I've tried restarting the game, but the same thing happens everytime. I start one mission, it looks fine, I go onto the next one and the text is all messed up. Do you start the game with fs2 open or do you use the launcher? I don't have any extras on besides the basic media_vps. What is causing this problem? 

[taylor]

Try a different graphics API (OpenGL or D3D).  If that works then let us know which one doesn't and provide your video card info and video driver version.

[Meanman]

Problem solved!!!! I switched over to D3D and enabled the "Fix font distortion problem" option and it works great. I'm pretty sure the video card is a ATI Radeon IGP 340M and it was OpenGL that gave me problems. My driver is ati2dvag and the version is 6.13.00106218. I don't know if this is the right stuff, I used Direct X Diagnostic to find this. Thanks for being patient with me.

[taylor]

We no longer support D3D, so the problem isn't actually "solved".   It just means that you'll get the problem again in the next version of FSO, and you won't have to ability to do anything about it (since only OpenGL will be available).

The best advice I can give right now is to just try and get updated drivers from your laptop manufactuer (I know newer drivers exist, just not sure where they can be found exactly).  Hopefully that will properly resolve the problem.  If it doesn't then I'll see if I can't think of a reason for the fonts to get corrupted and then do up some sort of code fix.

[Meanman]

It works with OpenGL too. Like I said it was just a stupid mistake I made. If I enable the font fix then it is fine in OpenGL.

[taylor]

The font fix doesn't do anything in OpenGL, it's only for D3D, so that shouldn't have made any difference.  The problem that you have (had) isn't what the font fix actually fixes anyway, it merely adjusts the UV coords to get rid of boxes around the letters.  OpenGL doesn't need such crap though, so support for that was never added to the OpenGL code.

[Meanman]

That's strange. I did update my video driver, so maybe that was it. I'm not worried anymore; FSO works with OpenGL so I'm good.

[takashi]

you think a mod would lock a complaint/bug report thread once the problem is solved?

[jr2]

No, unless they expected someone to butt in for absolutely no reason... which usually isn't a problem. 

[karajorma]

you think a mod would lock a complaint/bug report thread once the problem is solved?

We don't usually have to. And if we don't it means that if someone else has the same problem a few days later and the fix doesn't work they can bump the old topic and we'll be able to read exactly what advice we gave the last person.

Locking topics is a needless hassle that wouldn't be needed if people didn't feel the need to bump a topic for no good reason!