Text Appears as White Blocks

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julien
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Text Appears as White Blocks

#1 Post by julien »

Edit: Moved from here /Edit

Hi guys,

Have we made any progress in solving this bug? I have seen other posts about font issues but this one corresponds exactly to what I see: part of the text is replaced by white blocks (of different sizes, not just the classic ASCII square). I have tried to remove the fonts present in default/ and nothing changed (neither in better nor in worse).
I'm on a netbook (under Windows, with version 0.4.3+), maybe it has something to do with its unorthodox screen resolution. On my desktop I didn't have this problem, but I'm in holidays 2000km away from home so I cannot test whether the 0.4.3+ version still works on my desktop. Moreover, the reason I was installing FO on my netbook was that I was thinkink about giving a hand in developpement (my desktop computer doesn't have an internet connexion).
Additionnally, it works on the Debian of my netbook, the issue is only under Windows. But under Linux the program lags a lot on my poor netbook, so that it's not really playable.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

As with the various other reports of this issue (eg. this), all that I can suggest is trying updating your graphics drivers.

Others have reported that changing random system settings or fonts had some effect, though I don't know why or how they would, as FreeOrion should just be loading the fonts that came with it in /default

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adrian_broher
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#3 Post by adrian_broher »

We use a texture atlas to render text. We create a texture containing glyphs at runtime (something like this) and using parts of this texture to render the text onto quads (the blocks you see). I would assume that your hardware/driver combination doesn't allow textures of the format (size or the way we store it like grayscale) we use to create the glyph atlas.

When not installing any vendor specific driver for your graphic card windows uses a build-in OpenGL implementation which doesn't implement any better capabilities or has any notable performance. That's why you should check that first. Also do use the driver provided by the graphic card chip vendor, NOT the one provided by windows update.

Your hardware could also be so low end that it can't provide the texture dimensions required. Which is quite possible because you said it's a Netbook. You would need to tell us the graphic chip vendor and type so we could give any advice.
I have tried to remove the fonts present in default/ and nothing changed (neither in better nor in worse).
This however WILL break your installation.
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Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.
Git author: Marcel Metz

julien
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#4 Post by julien »

It's indeed very low-end, and I have been very disappointed with this netbook. It an Intel GMA 3600 inside an Atom 2600. But hardware doesn't explain everything since the font issue does not appear under Linux. However, it would not be the first game to have compatibility issues with my netbook.

I see there is a minor update for the pilote, I'm going to give a try...

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adrian_broher
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#5 Post by adrian_broher »

julien wrote:But hardware doesn't explain everything since the font issue does not appear under Linux.
Investigating that further I can say that is because there is no driver with 3d hardware acceleration for Linux for this specific card. The chip itself wasn't developed by Intel but by PowerVR. And because there is no 3d acceleration Mesa (the commonly used OpenGL implementation under Linux) falls back to software rendering, which is very slow but feature complete. So my guess about the texture being too big is still valid.

For the windows part I couldn't find anything specific for your card but general disappointment. Seems like this chip is the unloved stepchild of the Intel family.
Resident code gremlin
Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.
Git author: Marcel Metz

julien
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#6 Post by julien »

adrian_broher wrote:Investigating that further I can say that is because there is no driver with 3d hardware acceleration for Linux for this specific card. The chip itself wasn't developed by Intel but by PowerVR. And because there is no 3d acceleration Mesa (the commonly used OpenGL implementation under Linux) falls back to a software implementation, which is very slow but feature complete. So my guess about the texture being too big is still valid.
Indeed, I already knew there were no 3d acceleration (that's quite obvious when you see the screen :P) but I hadn't thought about the fact that the software implementation is more complete. It makes sense. I could even try to confirm that through desactivating the 3d acceleration under Windows, for a test.

Do you think I could easily avoid the issue by cutting the texture atlas into smaller pieces? If it sounds doable I can try to work on a patch, FO deserve to work on netbooks, it's not like if it were heavily resource-intensive. And in the same time trying to add more error-control, because I've not found any error message in my log files.

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MatGB
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#7 Post by MatGB »

FO is fairly resource intensive, I get fairly big lag problems using a midspec laptop with 4GB RAM and a 2GHz multi-core processor. I first played the game on my old netbook, but once the AI started working and a fair amount more was done in other areas it became impossible. If you can get it working, that'd be grand, but I suspect you'd need to strip out a huge number of different features and effects.
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julien
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Re: Text Appears as White Blocks

#8 Post by julien »

MatGB wrote:FO is fairly resource intensive, I get fairly big lag problems using a midspec laptop with 4GB RAM and a 2GHz multi-core processor.
Really?? It used to work perfectly on my 7-years aged desktop computer with 3GB RAM. It looks like the only important thing for FO is the graphic card.

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