[BUG] Font smoothing/antialiasing/cleartype turning off by itself

Makes the smaller fonts partially unintelligible

from Elemental Forums

     Hi.

 I am running Fallen Enchantress 1.12 on Windows 8 x64. My problem is that after a little while (just a few minutes of playing) my fonts seem to loose smoothing/antialiasing/cleartype/whatchamacallit. I haven't been able to figure out if any particular action in the game is causing it. Most fonts remain readable, but the smallest ones get pretty bad.

 Here is a link to debug.err and a screenshot of the problem. The screenshot shows a tooltip of a technology. The one on the left is the correct one (with font smotting) and is readable. The one on the right is how it looks after a little while of playing. If I zoom in I can tell that it says "+1 Faction Prestige", but at 100 % zoom (and ingame) it looks like it says "-1 Faction Prestige". Obviously this is only an example, but it makes reading all tooltips a bit of a hit-and-miss affair.

Is this a known problem? Are there any known solutions? I've tried searching and I've found some old posts about this, but the problems seem to have been solved by either enabling cleartype in Windows (it is enabled on my computer) or enabling font smoothing in the game (the option no longer exists in the GUI, but in C:\Users\username\Documents\My Games\FallenEnchantress\Prefs.ini I do find "FontSmoothing=1". Anyway this seems like a different problem since the font smoothing is working initially, but then is turned off for some unknown reason.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31,008 views 10 replies
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

I am experiencing this as well with 1.32.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

not to resurrect an old post but ive been searching for answers to these problems and i have to say its kind of dissapointing to see no reply's with an acknowledgement of the issue or some sort of support :/

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I keep searching every few days for an answer but nothing.

I have been trying to work out exactly when it happens but it is too random. The font goes from being completely readable to unreadable and then back again.

I tried changing my cleartype windows settings but it had no effect.

There is no response from the developers.

I don't play the game now because of this problem nor will I buy any expansions. Such a shame.

 

edit:

The problem is not always universal when it happens. It sometimes only seems to effect certain texts in certain tooltip windows.

The two screen shots below were taken at the same time.

 

Good font





 Bad font

 

Mind you, both windows had good text when the game first started. It was only after a couple of minutes playing that the fonts changed.


So I am now asserting that it is not a windows problem or a hardware problem but a problem with the way the game is rendering the fonts.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

hmmm, does anyone have a current debug.err of this happening? the one at the top of the thread is out of date. Also has anyone had it happen in the new LH build? Or still just FE?

 

Thanks

-Toby

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

for people still getting this in FE, please update your drivers and if you still have these problems message me or e-mail me ([email protected]). We have something we would like to try to see if we can fix it.

 

-Toby

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

After a lot of testing and supplying error reports to Stardock they have come up with a solution that has worked for me and I hope for you.

It appears that Fallen Enchantress has a conflict with MSI Afterburner.

If you are using this utility turn it off and the font problem disappears!

 

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Windows 7 x64 - Radeon 7850 here, been having this exact same issue since the game was released, sometimes the font is great and then after some minutes or after I enter\exit combat this happen. I really wish they would had fixed by now. My monitor resolution is 1600x900, from what I understand its not a very common one, still, had no issues with it.

 

Pastebin for debug.err (made it to expire in a month): http://pastebin.com/8Nz2U2f3

 

Edit: Forgot to say, I do not use MSI afterburner.

Another edit: More info, and another thing that may be useful mentioning, on the Video settings in control panel, theres a tab where I can set the text to 100, 125 and 150%, and mine is set to 125%.

 

I set it back to 100% (default) to test, problem still persists. Saw something that I havent noticed before: in the build menu, when I alternated the mouse hovering in the tooltips, one was fine while the other was "garbled".

 

Picture: Font 1 and Font 2

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top
Its been a week and no replies? At least a "we read this thread and will check it when possible" would be good. I know you guys are busy with the newly launched LH, but please keep supporting FE.
Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Gave up on stardock patching the game, since they abandoned it to legendary heroes, but posting this to help people who also have this issue. A application that uses overlay (bandicam in my case) was the culprit here. After disabling it on fallen enchantress, the font stopped being buggy. So if you have this problem and have any program that uses overlay (like display of gpu temperature or FPS), try disabling it and it may fix it.