Problem with blank walls in Vista

[Finster]

Not sure if this is a problem unique to Vista, haven't been able to try the latest Angband on other platforms, yet.

Basically, what is happening is that wall blocks are not showing up anywhere in the game, they are just black squares. They appear correctly when using graphics tiles, but I've always preferred regular text over the graphics tiles. Nostalgia, I guess. Anyway, here is what I mean:

[dionysian]

can't say for sure if that's a vista problem, but i don't get anything like that using any of the linux ports that i've tried (x11, gtk or gcu).

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by Finster

Not sure if this is a problem unique to Vista, haven't been able to try the latest Angband on other platforms, yet.

Basically, what is happening is that wall blocks are not showing up anywhere in the game, they are just black squares. They appear correctly when using graphics tiles, but I've always preferred regular text over the graphics tiles. Nostalgia, I guess. Anyway, here is what I mean:

This reminds me of an old problem. Can you do the following and see if it helps:

1. Go to lib/pref/font-win.prf
2. Comment out (put '#') before every line which doesn't already have one.
3. Reload the game.

If it does, I'll have to ship the next release with this fix and hope no-one minds seeing hashes for walls instead of blocks of gray.

[zaimoni]

No, this is not specific to Vista: WinXP has also been reported as affected.

I do not recall the specific workarounds for this, though. You might try running in a compatibility mode (Windows 2000 is not affected).

[dionysian]

Originally Posted by takkaria

If it does, I'll have to ship the next release with this fix and hope no-one minds seeing hashes for walls instead of blocks of gray.

isn't that what they're supposed to be in the first place?

[Rasit]

I have the same problem (Vista Business 32 bit). Setting compability mode to 2000 did not help for me but Takakarias trick fixed it for me.

[Finster]

Originally Posted by takkaria

This reminds me of an old problem. Can you do the following and see if it helps:

1. Go to lib/pref/font-win.prf
2. Comment out (put '#') before every line which doesn't already have one.
3. Reload the game.

If it does, I'll have to ship the next release with this fix and hope no-one minds seeing hashes for walls instead of blocks of gray.

Well, I can now see the walls. They show up as the hashes instead of the blocks. Personally, I like the blocks better, but this works too.

Also, FWIW, I had tried compatibility mode and that didn't affect anything.

Thanks!

[Leon Marrick]

This problem has been reported several times; I particularly recall a long discussion over how centered dots weren't appearing in WinXP.

The solution is twofold: Use custom fonts ... and fix the Windows port. Go to http://runegold.org/angband/xchar/for some custom font resources and related improvements for Angband and variants.

One you download the fonts, and while you're waiting for the official Windows port to get squared away, rebooting your machine may help if you experience font glitches.

[Kiyoshi Aman]

What we should do is implement Unicode support and provide fonts with the necessary glyphs so we can do glyph substitution. This should fix the named issue, and it also lets us use accents on the various names that, properly speaking, should have them.

[pav]

Wasn't this already done for NPP? There's heaps of funny looking characters in that game.