Text appears outside of box, sometimes below screen

There are several instances where text appears BELOW the box it is obviously intended for... in the Civapedia, the Advisors on screen, even the Copyright notice at the beginning of the game.

HOWEVER, it is worst on the negotiating screen!
The only option I have is 'do you accept'
If I want to quit the screen, I need to use escape.
'Active' is not.. .well, active. I can see it, but I cant choose it.

I have:
p3 - 500 Mhz
128 MB of RAM
Win98SE
DirectX from Civ3 CD
Matrox G400 video card (I thought I had the latest drivers, but Auto Update in Win98SE told me otherwise, so I have the ones I got from MICROSOFT... not sure how that works)

Thanks!

Jeremy

I have the same problem! but I'm coping for now.

When SMAC came out the Startup screen would be enormous, you could only see the buttons, not the text and you had to guess at first what each button did. Eventually Firaxis fixed the problem with a patch, but I don't want to have to wait months for them to fix this problem.

I hope someone out there has found an easy fix.

I have the exact same problem, glad I'm not alone. I have an GeForce 2, Win98. I've reinstalled NVidia drivers and DirectX drivers, no help.

One other symptom - the fonts are blocky and ugly as sin. (Yes, I have font smoothing turned on in Windows - only Civ III has the problem).

You can make the game more playable by going into 1280x1024 mode - the text that goes off screen will now be visible. Sometimes it's black on black, though. See the README.TXT for how to change video modes.

I found the answer to this problem in another thread on the bulletin board; if you remove the font Lucida Sans Regular, it all magically works. Just tried it, good for me. (To remove the font, do Start\Run\Open "fonts", which brings you to c:\windows\fonts, then drag LucidaSansRegular.ttf out of the folder to your desktop).

I do not know if this "fix" has any other adverse affects - presumably, any other program trying to use that font would be unhappy. I wonder where Civ III is getting it when I remove it?

Another related issue is that newer NVidia GeForce drivers ("Detonator drivers") seem to have some troubles, at least according to the threads I read. No idea if it's related to this font problem or not.

I have read that you should upgrade your windows with the latest upgrades. !!!! This should help you with the"LETTER" errors. Although that is what was written in the manual.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work for me. I finally hacked around with the fonts enough so that I could either get them to be legible or fit inside the boxes... never both at the same time. I wouldn't care if I could just click on Active/Clear/New in the Diplomacy screen... When I actually had Lucida up properly.. the font size it used wasn't very legible on my computer... even outside of Civ... any thoughts on this?

I had the same font problem. I opened the civ folder, and there was a TrueType font labeled "Lucinda sans". I moved this to the windows/fonts directory and after rebooting, most of the text appears correctly. Occasionally there is some overlap or misfitting of the type in the space provided, but this is now very rare. You might want to open your civ folders and see if there is a font symbol, which like TT, in blue.

I had the same problem at install. It looked as if everything was trying to type itself over and over one just one line. I experienced this on two separate systems. The fix I found was to install the latest DirectX from Windows Update... 8.1 I believe it was. It was newer than the 8.0a that came on Civ3.... Hope it helps!

Mudslyde VII

Thank you!!!! nelson@monkey.o


I got it to work by removing Lucida Sans Regular from the font folder. I had contacted tech support about this and they had given me a long drawn out solution that they couldn't even say would work or not.

Thanks -

Bob
Twin Towers Forever