Game loads but no text whatsoever

[Poena]

Downloaded the game from cnet.downloads (quicker), installed and found it had no text at all. Any place that text would be including on the entrance post-splash screen (i know from CotN that the top one would be start game, third down would be settings and last would be exit) was simply a blank but attractive button. Not a whole lotta help there. When clicking where start game would be, game loaded fine but again, no text at all. Nothing. Could not read messages, tried to play blind but had no idea what I was doing so no go.

I read here, installed latest driver for my Nvidia GeForce 5600, tested it out.. still no text. Uninstalled and redownloaded it from vugames source, reinstalled, same thing exactly. Clearly it's my pc. I have *i think* a decent amount of ram, 1 gig. What could it be? Any tips on what to post here to give you more of a chance to see the problem let me know. Thanks

edit: i should add I play CotN to exhaustion without any problems at all.

[Keith]

Uninstall your current drivers, reboot, and try the 91.33 unofficial beta drivers here instead:

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_winxp_2k_32bit_91.33.html

It's helped a number of people with Nvidia cards.

BTW, post your dxdiag.txt file.

[Poena]

I uninstalled the driver I had just uploaded, rebooted, downloaded driver you indicated and installed. Now my desktop is all out of wack and sadly still same problem. Kind of weird looking, all the buttons are there, everything is there, game plays even. Just no text. Two different downloads too so I'm sure it's my system. Dxdiag file attached. Thanks for trying.

What I don't get is why I can play CotN without issue but not Caesar IV. Different something I guess, although it seems the same.

[Keith]

Well, those 91.33 drivers are a unofficial beta version. I guess you should uninstall them and go back to the 91.31 set.

Your FX 5200 is a DX9 card. Other than you three year old sound drivers for your SB Live! card I don't see much wrong.

I assume you did install the DX9 version that the demo comes with, right?

[Poena]

Yep, installed dx9 that game came with (always needs updating that thing!) If it was game play I could understand, but it's just the text that doesn't show up. I'll try updating my sound card drivers, who knows. May work! Been DYING for this game to come out at least in demo mode since it was announced over a year ago. I'll wait for the game release and buy it the second I can whether i get the demo to work or not, so I'll quit whining uselessly to you for now :o

[Keith]

That's definitely odd. I agree it has to be something on your system causing the problem, but what I could not say.

Did you install the demo to the selected default location the installer provided?

[mouse]

The text doesn't display because you don't have a font that is supported.

[Poena]

I have possibly the most ridiculously comprehensive list of fonts installed I've ever seen including all the basics that came with WinXP, but who knows right? Perhaps I uninstalled whatever one the game is using on accident when installing other fonts. Is it possible to list what particular font the game uses? In COTN the fonts displayed on the buttons are images, and not a font itself, so I can't guess.

Oh, and I went and updated my sound card driver, and things went really wonky from there. I think it's the sound card or a conflict, makes the most sense. I don't have too much running, well I don't think it's too much.

Anyway, thank you so much for trying, I see alot of posts and everyone has been replied to, best forum tech help I've seen on any game!

[Alexstarfire]

Well, I'm having the exact same problems as described here. Since I'm new let me post some specs first.

My computer:
CPU: A64 3700+ Socket 939 @ 2.64Ghz
Motherboard: DFI LanParty SLI-DR
RAM: 2x1GB OCZ PC3200 @ 240Mhz 3-3-2-6
PSU: Antec 430w TruePower II
Video Card: X1800XT 512MB /w Beta Catalyst 6.8 drivers
Sound Card: Sound Blaster 2 ZS

I believe that's all the necissary hardware specs. While I do have my CPU, RAM, and video card OCed I have also tried them at stock speeds and the same thing occurs. Could be the beta drivers for the video card, but I'm not sure. Haven't tried other drivers yet, but I'll try some other ones. I would also like to point out that I didn't install the DirectX version in the demo, but I don't even remember it asking me about it. I do have the DirectX 9.0c August version installed. Don't see why that wouldn't work since it's the latest version. Also, I have a very slimmed down version of XP which I made with nLite. I did take out a lot of fonts, but I don't see why they wouldn't include the font that the game needs. Other than this I haven't encountered any other problems.

I also have a 7900GT video card that I have yet to install, still benchmarking this one. Once that's done I'll install the nVidia card with the latest drivers to see if it's the ATI drivers or something. I have multiple driver versions for both cards so I'll try them out if the ones I originally install don't work.

Anyways, hope this helps. I loved Caesar III and thought this one would be incredible. Hopefully the retail version works properly.

[Keith]

The no fonts only seem to be happening on a few systems.

Perhaps its a heat issue. Is the X1800XT fan running?

Other than that, you may want to try lowering all the in-game settings to mininums or off on the video settings menu to see if the font appears. If they do, then one of those settings is causing the problem.

I assume you have the Catalyst Control Center installed then?

Are you using default settings in the CCC? Most of mine are set to let the application to decide what feature to use.

I'm running a older 9800 Pro, which tends to run hot too.

[Alexstarfire]

OMFG, you may be a freakin' genius. I just remembered that I have AA forced to 4x. I already know from experience that not all games run properly when AA is forced, Warcraft III being one for sure. Anyways, I'm not at my apartment, since my apartment doesn't have the interenet hooked up, but I'll give that a try and see what happens.

Also, no the fan isn't running, but that's because I'm not air cooling it. My temps are in the mid 40s under full load with a volt mod. It idles just under 40.

I do have the CCC installed, least I believe I do. Anyways, my ATI driver thingy, wether it be CCC or not, doesn't want to run on my computer. I believe it's the CLI.exe file that doesn't run properly. Anyways, I'm using ATI Tray Tool for all my driver needs. I've turned the Catalyst AI off as well.

[Alexstarfire]

Well, after playing around with the files for a while I figured out why the text isn't showing up. Apparently Sierra is stupid enough to not include the proper font in the installation files. If you go into the Caesar 4 folder and open up the LanguageTexts.xml file you can see that they use 4 fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma, and Palatino. Palatino is the font that is used on the startup screen and most other places. You can replace "Palatino" with "Times New Roman" or some other font that you have installed. The only problem with using other fonts is that you probably can't do the next part. A couple of lines down they start talking about Glyphs for the fonts. Palatino is Font 3 so all you need to do, if you changed it to Times New Roman, is to changed the numbers to the ones from the line above. I believe that's "0-255". If you didn't then I don't know what you'd put.

Anyways, I did this and got the text to appear. However, as I don't know what the screens should look like I don't know it everything is there. When I look at the settings screens it looks like some boxes are missing, but that could be because I changed some other things too. I've figured out how to skip the intro screen and the exit screen. I've also found out how to make the stupid website to stop popping up.

I can upload these files for those having this problem if anyone would like me to. Or you could simply download the Palatino font.

OMFG, since when was it ok to make people pay $20+ to get a stupid font. Can someone just freakin upload the Palatino font for us people who don't have it?

[Keith]

The palatino font is a standard XP installed font. If you don't have it then something either deleted it or it never installed when Windows was installed on your system. Either that or they may be corrupted.

There should be 4 in all in your C:\Windows\Fonts folder, pala.ttf, palab.ttf, palabi.ttf, and palai.ttf.

Standard installed windows XP fonts (http://www.styopkin.com/articles/fonts_installed_winxp.html)

[existenz]

How did you get the "stupid" website to stop popping up. :( Whenever I exit I get the website? Thanks

[Alexstarfire]

I know it's a standard font, but like I said, I modified my version of XP with nLite. I removed most of the unused fonts.

Anyways, to remove the website from popping up you have to go open up the "NewConstants.txt" file in the Data folder. I believe it's in the main Data folder and not the subfolders. Anyways, you have to scroll down about 2/3 of the way and it has 4 lines that talk about the intro and exit screens. One has the time, in milliseconds, of the intro screen. Change the value of 4500 to 0 to make the intro screen not appear. The next line has the URL to go to "www.caesariv.com". You can just delete that line to make it stop popping up. The line after that has the max number of outro, exit, screens. You can leave that. The last line says how many exit screens there are, default is 1. Change that to 0 so it just quits.

[Keith]

How did you get the "stupid" website to stop popping up. :( Whenever I exit I get the website? Thanks

???? Not sure what you mean there. There doesn't appear to be any popups, but then I have my popup blocker on. Usually I get a small sound when a popup is blocked and don't hear anything.

If you are getting popups to a specific site all the time you may have a browser hijack virus running on your system. I had to clean one off my system a couple of months ago.

[Alexstarfire]

Well, unless your browser just happens to be open when you close the game you won't get the sound. You probably have some virus/spyware blocker or something that blocks the game from opening up your browser.

Anyways, it's not a browser hijack: 1. because I haven't been connected to the internet for like 2 months and 2. because I'm not a moron. I know what a browser hijack is and if you actually looked into the file that I'm talkng about you'd see that it's supposed to happen.

[Keith]

My mistake. I didn't look closely enough and though you were talking about the page I posted the link to.

Editing the NewConstants.txt file to prevent the website page from opening upon exiting the game is old news.

For those reading this not sure what it is, just change the section in the NewConstants.txt file to look like this:

PublisherDemo;bool;1
InitialSplashScreenTime;int;2500
Demo/ExitGame/URL;string;0
Demo/ExitGame/MaxOutroScreens;int;0
Demo/ExitGame/NumOutroScreens;int;0

Just use Windows Notepad program. Open the NewConstants.txt file. Under EDIT select FIND. Type URL. That will jump you right to the pertinent section. Make the change as above and then resave the file as NewConstants.txt.

You should make a backup copy of the file before you edit it for safety sake.