Vista upgrade: Font Problem

[SammyW1000]

Hi there, I've recently got a new laptop with Vista, and I think that I have two problems.

1. The font looks awful, the numbers are all wonky and colons are crushed together. It seems too small. I've checked other posts which seem to report similar problems, but haven't seen a concrete solution

2. I *think* that my wonder movies are not working. I may be wrong though...do shrines have movies? The leader animations work fine so I think I might just be being dumb!!

I'm using the Civ IV complete set.

My computer is a Dell XPS M1330 and it has a nVidia 8400M video card (I've updated the drivers). I can give more details if needed, it's just that these aren't major problems and seem to be video card related. If there are any other things that I should do to ensure everything runs smoothly then it would be great if somebody could let me know

Cheers

 

[ori]

welcome back to the posting side

the shrines do not have wonder movies.
could you post a screenshot of the graphics problem?
is Vista using some weird font? what is your setting for non-unicode languages?

 

[SammyW1000]

Thanks for the reply and the welcome back! I was all grumpy last night that somebody had already taken my usual username before I realised that that person had actually been me !

Anyway good to hear that the movie thing was just me being stupid. The screenshot attached shows what I'm talking about with the font...maybe I was being a bit OTT calling it awful, it's just on my old computer it was nice and rounded, gentle and easier to read. I'll try attaching an old screenshot off my other computer so you can maybe see what I mean. One possibility is that it is something to do with resolution. My info screens, which used to fill the whole screen, now only fill part of it, with the map staying below. I've tried using a lower resolution but it didn't really help.

I checked my non uni-code setting, it was at English (UK) and I changed it to English (US). This *may* have helped a little...the numbers and colons are still messy but I don't feel as generally offended as I did last night. This might be my imagination though. The general Vista font is fine and hasn't been changed since I started.

The other things I have done was 1) to copy the syfaen font from the Civ IV assets/res/fonts folder to the Warlords assets/res folder. This didn't do anything, and I am getting the same problem with the Civ IV original program anyway. 2) I tried running the program in the compatibility mode I saw mentioned on here. I set it to Windows XP, but the program won't start then, it cannot find the CD.

I hope this is helpful info...I hope I'm not just being an old woman about this, a night's sleep seems to have made the problem look even less important!

Thanks for your help

 

[ori]

it does indeed use a slightly different font than mine on win XP - though I had to look hard...
anyway:
you could try changing this from 0 to 1 in your civilizationIV.ini:

; Use managed interface textures (may be safer but shouldn't be needed, uses more memory)
GUIManagedTextures = 0

 

[SammyW1000]

Here is a screenshot of what it used to look like. I feel a little silly to be honest, feel free to tell me to just live with it! I hope you agree though that it did used to look a bit nicer.

 

[ori]

it is nicer - and it is the way it looks on my machine
did you try what I posted above?

 

[SammyW1000]

Sorry about the slow reply, had to rush off to work! I tried what you suggested but it didn't seem to work. Just to clarify though, where is the exact location of the file I'm supposed to be altering? I searched and came up with four files called 'CivilizationIV' which Vista calls Configuration Settings files. Looking in their locations (Users/Sam/Documents/My Games/either Civilization IV Complete or Warlords) it seems like there are actually only 2 though (the search brought up each twice for some reason). Anyway, I changed them all to what you suggested but it didn't seem to have any effect.

 

[ori]

you found the correct ones - they are located in
my games\<gamename>\
where each of the games has its own. They show up twice because there are shortcuts for them in the main install folder as well.
another possibility:
go the your assets/res/fonts/ folder and rightclick on the sylfaen.ttf file - then choose install.

 

[SammyW1000]

Jackpot!

You're a legend, thank you so much for your help !

Keep up the good work mate