all text is pink squares

[Charley2u]

Hi, I just installed Kerbal through Steam. When it loads, there are pink blocks instead of text. I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem. Please help

[sal_vager]

8 hours ago, Charley2u said:

Hi, I just installed Kerbal through Steam. When it loads, there are pink blocks instead of text. I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem. Please help

Hiya Charley2u, this is a new one, it's not supposed to do that.

As a guess I'd say your operating system is missing a font or the graphics driver is old and needs to be updated, you'll have to provide more info on your system for us to help further though, please see this thread.

 

[Charley2u]

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/fonts-missing-after-windows-10-update/d145ab35-f6af-4708-b41b-e32d9e9da470 I am trying this. windows 10 may be the culprit. let you know how it works out

[jamesd882]

On 16/02/2017 at 3:18 AM, Charley2u said:

Hi, I just installed Kerbal through Steam. When it loads, there are pink blocks instead of text. I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem. Please help

Hi, I'm having this problem too - all text appears as unreadable pink blocks. 

I have just installed on a 32bit Win7, which itself was recently a fresh install (upgraded an old XP PC), the GForce graphics card drived was updated too. Could be a missing font as you suggest? Which is it so I can check if present in Win7?

Thanks.

[Charley2u]

I added every font on windows 10 64bit so that didn't help me either. There is little technical help finding a text that works , not that its not out there, just that windows has some monopoly over what we can download, at least that is what I understood. I am glad to know jamesd882 that I am not the only one. If there is a fix for this , please let me know.

[sal_vager]

Are you using any mods? Scatterer is known to break rendering in KSP, causing magenta textures to be shown.

Please take a look at the thread here, I can't help you without more info such as your logs and dxdiag.

 

[Charley2u]

No mods.

[sal_vager]

6 hours ago, Charley2u said:

No mods.

Well then all I can suggest is that you install the latest graphics card drivers as this is not a known issue with Kerbal Space Program.

Please see here for Nvidia graphics cards.

Here for AMD.

And here for Intel.

If a driver is not provided for your graphics card you'll have to consider upgrading.

Sorry but without info I cannot help you any further than this.

[jamesd882]

Apologies if I'm hijacking your post Charley2u's, but since it a similar problem...

Here's the info sal_vager requested:

KSP version: 1.2.2 on Windows 7 32bit
build id = 01622
2016.12.06

1.2.2.1622 (WindowsPlayer) *******
Kerbal Space Program - 1.2.2.1622 (WindowsPlayer)

OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (6.1.7601)
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz (2)
RAM: 2048
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (256MB)
SM: 20 (Direct3D 9.0c [nv4_disp.dll 6.14.11.7519])
RT Formats: ARGB32, ARGBHalf, Shadowmap, RGB565, Default, DefaultHDR, ARGBFloat, RGHalf, RFloat

A detailed explanation: The opening screen displays ok, after clicking play the game loads but all the text is pink blocks 

Here are some sceenshots:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By2bPxeWVQHzeFF1blpQeF9ITlE

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By2bPxeWVQHzNzliOWpnNzNzcG8

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By2bPxeWVQHzaGdMd0Foc0pBWFE

Text within the grey dialogue boxes and on buttons doesn't display at all.

Clean install/ No previous versions were installed, and only Chrome, KSP and an anti-virus program on the PC. No mods.

It could be a graphics card issue - My pc was recently upgraded from XP to Win7(32bit), but NVidia don't seem to officially provide a driver for the GeForce FX5200 for Win7. However, loads of forums suggest installing the Vista 32 driver which I have done, and while graphics on the pc are fine in all other respects, the KSP display problem is the same as with the older XP driver. 

I also tried restoring the default fonts, but the button is deactivated in Windows - maybe because it already has them as it's only just recently been installed.

I hope you can help.

 

 

[sal_vager]

Thanks @jamesd882, I don't know if I can help with what you've provided, there might be something in your KSP output_log.txt that would help, or the driver version numbers in your dxdiag hardware report.

But just to tell you what I know, KSP is using a Unity asset called text mesh pro (TMP) for most text in the game, only some text on buttons such as the navball SAS and RCS are artwork rather than text.

TMP isn't much different to how the Unity engine handles text in a 3D scene, simply put, Unity places a flat mesh object and the text is a texture on that object, the problem with Unity is there is no control over the meshes so text can be blurry, in TMP every character gets its own mesh of two polygons, this gets rid of the blur and is why you're seeing squares, each square is a single letter.

They are actually magenta rather than pink, magenta is commonly used to denote pixels that won't be rendered, just like an alpha channel, any magenta pixels should not be drawn to the screen, as they are being drawn it suggests the character textures generated by Unity have not been converted to a format the graphics card recognizes, or the alpha channel has been lost.

That you're not seeing text on your resume saves window is a concern though, KSP should have a font bundled with it in the Unity asset files in KSP_Data, so won't need a font on your PC.

Likely the text is there, but it can be behind the other layers of the scene so you can't see it.

There's a few things that might cause this, for a start your graphics card is really old, it may just not support what KSP needs, I don't know if using the wrong driver is contributing but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Another cause may be this.

SM: 20 (Direct3D 9.0c [nv4_disp.dll 6.14.11.7519])

Squad dropped support for shader model (SM) 2.0 a few versions ago, you will need shader model 3.0 or higher, it can be forced in the settings.cfg file though, but it's meant for terrain, I don't know if it will affect the text, look for this line.

UNSUPPORTED_LEGACY_SHADER_TERRAIN = False

Change that to True in notepad and save the file, start KSP and see if it changes anything, you should just get darker green grass and horrible looking seas.

Another thing to try is forcing the Unity engine to use OpenGL instead of D3D9, this isn't supported and may not work or may cause lots of new graphics issues, but it's an option, you do this by making a shortcut to the KSP.exe on Windows and adding the following to the target box of the shortcuts properties.

Quote

 -force-opengl

There's a space just in front of that, don't forget the gap between the target box contents and that command.

What it does is force Unity to use the older OpenGL 2 renderer, you might need to use that along with UNSUPPORTED_LEGACY_SHADER_TERRAIN to get things to work, or it might not, there's a newer command for newer OpenGL versions, -force-glcore but I think your graphics card will be too old for that.

If none of that works I think you will need to consider a new graphics card, if you're using a desktop that's easy enough, and KSP ran fine for me with a Nvidia GTX650, they are still over $100 in many places though, but you may find a better and more common card for less money.

On a laptop you could try an external graphics card, I don't know if these are good for KSP.

Whichever you go for it may be good money after bad if the PC or laptop is so old that other parts of it slow KSP down, KSP is very dependent on a fast CPU, so no matter how good your graphics card is if your CPU is weak KSP will be very slow, and likely unplayable.

It might even be worth considering Linux, but even here there's no guarantee it'll work, there is a very old driver but it may require a lot of work getting it into a recent Linux distribution, It's not in the package manager for Linux Mint 18.1 or Ubuntu 16.04, likely you'd have to install it manually, use an old distro or try the open source driver for Nvidia which is notoriously poor.

Either way the hardware doesn't support SM 3.0, and KSP doesn't support SM 2.0, sooner or later you're going to need a better computer, sorry

[Charley2u]

sal_vager  Thank you for your help. I wasn't able to install the NVidia for not compatible reason. The intel recommended warning since I am on a dell, so unsure I didn't get it. . I asked for a refund. I'm sure you could have figured it out fast from my side but I am not as savvy as I wish I was yet. Thank you. And, Hey jamesd882 thanks for contributing

[jamesd882]

Hi sal_vager, thanks for the advice. I tried the config change and the OpenGL shortcut, neither worked unfortunately.

I hadn't realised that my pc had become quite that obsolete! Like you say, no point throwing good money after bad, time to donate this body to science.

Final question therefore, can I download KSP again to another machine, or do I have to buy it again? (Obvs not v keen on option 2 there!)

J

[sal_vager]

35 minutes ago, jamesd882 said:

Hi sal_vager, thanks for the advice. I tried the config change and the OpenGL shortcut, neither worked unfortunately.

I hadn't realised that my pc had become quite that obsolete! Like you say, no point throwing good money after bad, time to donate this body to science.

Final question therefore, can I download KSP again to another machine, or do I have to buy it again? (Obvs not v keen on option 2 there!)

J

You can download it as many times as you like, I didn't see if you mentioned where you bought KSP, but if it's from Squads store just log in, grab the installer and you'll be fine, there's older versions too, 1.0.5 and 1.1.3 are available.

If you have any trouble with your account email Squad at [email protected]